Using Flex3 in AIR standalone application.
I have a ton of children I need to add to a Canvas dynamically. When I do this, it takes a long time. So I wanted to display a loading bar to the user. I create a Timer, and every time the timer ticks, I update the loadingBar and I add the child. I also update a textField with the loading progress as a debug tool. What I find is that the textField _always_ updates correctly in realtime, but USUALLY the progress bar does NOT update at all until the entire sequence is finished. If I make the tick time long enough, then the progress bar works, but this time seems very dependent on performance of the individual machine. My question is, how do I know what the lowest possible tick time I can use to make the progress bar update correctly is? Why does it work with the Text field just fine? Or is there a better pattern I could be using to do this correctly? As you can see from the code, I tried some things like "updateAfterEvent" and "invalidateDisplayList" to see if I could get it to update faster, but those did not work (unless I set the tick time high). code here: private var pendingElementsToAdd:Array; private var totalElementstoAdd:int; private static const TIME_BETWEEN_ADDS:Number = 20; private function addElements(newElements:Array):void { this.pendingElementsToAdd = newElements; this.totalElementstoAdd = this.pendingElementsToAdd.length; var newEventTimer:Timer = new Timer(TIME_BETWEEN_ADDS, newElements.length); newEventTimer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, onTimerAddNewElement); newEventTimer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE, finishAddingElements); newEventTimer.start(); } private function onTimerAddNewElement(event:TimerEvent):void { this.loadingBar.setProgress(this.totalElementstoAdd - this.pendingElementsToAdd.length, this.totalElementstoAdd); this.loadingText.text = "Elements To Load: " + this.pendingElementsToAdd.length; event.updateAfterEvent(); this.loadingBar.invalidateDisplayList(); this.addChild(this.pendingElementsToAdd.pop()); }