User Guide

102 Creating Advanced MXML Components

You can also use the parentDocument property to reference the next object up in the

document chain of a Flex application. The

parentDocument property is inherited by all

components from the UIComponent class. For an MXML component, the

parentDocument

property references the Object corresponding to the component that referenced the MXML

component.

For more information on the

mx.core.Application.application static property and the

the

parentDocument property, see Chapter 14, “Using the Application Container,” on

page 571, in Flex 2 Developer’s Guide.

Even if the calling file does not pass a reference to the Application object, you can always

access it from your MXML component. For example, the following application contains a

custom component called StateComboBoxDirectRef. In this example,

StateComboBoxDirectRef is designed to write the index of the selected item in the

ComboBox to the TextArea control:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"

xmlns:MyComp="myComponents.*">

<mx:TextArea id="myTAMain"/>

<MyComp:StateComboBoxDirectRef/>

</mx:Application>