Flex 4 Printing by Adding dynamic items in a print area (AKA. how do I add dynamically named elements to another element on the fly)

Question

I have a number of items I add to the stage dynamically.

These are called flexShapeXXX where xxx is typically a unique ID.

Now I have created a component to store them in for printing, that I can treat as a virtual page so I can lay out stuff for printing.

This looks like this:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- myComponents\MyPrintView.mxml -->
<mx:VBox xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" 
         xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" 
         xmlns:mx="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx" 
         backgroundColor="#FFFFFF" 
         height="300" width="500" 
         paddingTop="50" paddingLeft="50" paddingRight="50">


</mx:VBox>

Now so far so good I then take my little print are vbox component:

var formPrintView:MyPrintView = new MyPrintView();
formPrintView.width = printJob.pageWidth - 50;
formPrintView.height = printJob.pageHeight - 50;    
addElement(formPrintView);

This works fine it add a nice space to work in.

Now I want to be able to do something like this:

formPrintView.addElement(dashPreview["flexShape" + TheID]);
printJob.addObject(formPrintView);

That part fails.

So my question is how do I addelements from the stage via dynamic names. So that I may print them.

Please and thank you for any help you can offer.

Craig

Answer 1

Can you please try my solution below and let me know if it doesnt work. Let us assume you have an UI Component : Page1

var page1:VBox = new VBox();

// Convert class name to Class object.
var cls:Class = getDefinitionByName(page1) as Class;
// Create a new instance of the class.
var instance:UIComponent = new cls();

var formPrintView:MyPrintView = new MyPrintView();
formPrintView.width = printJob.pageWidth - 50;
formPrintView.height = printJob.pageHeight - 50;   
formPrintView.addElement(instance);
printJob.addObject(formPrintView);