Specifications

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CHAPTER 5
The remaining sections of this topic describe how to use deferred creation to reduce overall application startup
time and ordered creation to make the initial startup time appear as short as possible to the user. But before you
can fully understand ordered creation and deferred creation, you must also understand the differences between
single-view and multiple-view containers, the order of events in a component’s startup life cycle, and how to
manually instantiate controls from their child descriptors.
About startup order
All Flex components trigger a number of events during their startup procedure. These events indicate when the
component is first created, plotted internally, and drawn on the screen. The events also indicate when the
component is finished being created and, in the case of containers, when its children are created.
Components are instantiated, added or linked to a parent, and then sized and laid out inside their container. The
component creation order is as follows:
The following example shows the major events that are dispatched during a component’s creation life cycle:
The creation order is different for containers and components because containers can be the parent of other
components or containers. Components within the containers must also go through the creation order. If a
container is the parent of another container, the inner container’s children must also go through the creation
order.
preinitialize
initialize
creationComplete
updateComplete