Hey everyone,

I hope somewhere can help me with this, because I have been running in circles
on this. I am developing on a fairly large application and have recently
noticed that instances of my class that have event listeners of data binding
tied to them cannot be garbage collected. It has led to some fantastically
bizarre artifacts and some gross memory leaks. Multiple copies of screens
modifying and accessing the same array collections and such...fun. The way I
see it, there are three real solutions here...

1.) dictate that all programmers declare weak references when creating event
listeners
2.) create some sort of onDestroy method that kills bindings and removes
eventlisteners when a child is removed from it's parent
3.) override the addEventListener method to ensure that weak references are
made, when people inevitable forget #1!

My questions are thrice: are those my only options?! Or have any of you more
experienced folks conquered this situation in a more elegant, reliable way? If
these are my only options, which is the best, in your opinions?

Thank you very much for any info you can give; I'm relatively new to Flex and
while I understand the GC's terms and conditions, I'm hoping there is some way
to avoid a massive rewrite/refactoring to make it work with me. Thanks again!

-=Bill

"bill.cabral" <webforumsuser@macromedia.com> wrote in message
news:gdqvng$cav$1@forums.macromedia.com...
> Hey everyone,
>
> I hope somewhere can help me with this, because I have been running in
> circles
> on this. I am developing on a fairly large application and have recently
> noticed that instances of my class that have event listeners of data
> binding
> tied to them cannot be garbage collected. It has led to some
> fantastically
> bizarre artifacts and some gross memory leaks. Multiple copies of screens
> modifying and accessing the same array collections and such...fun. The
> way I
> see it, there are three real solutions here...
>
> 1.) dictate that all programmers declare weak references when creating
> event
> listeners
> 2.) create some sort of onDestroy method that kills bindings and removes
> eventlisteners when a child is removed from it's parent
> 3.) override the addEventListener method to ensure that weak references
> are
> made, when people inevitable forget #1!
>
> My questions are thrice: are those my only options?! Or have any of you
> more
> experienced folks conquered this situation in a more elegant, reliable
> way? If
> these are my only options, which is the best, in your opinions?
>
> Thank you very much for any info you can give; I'm relatively new to Flex
> and
> while I understand the GC's terms and conditions, I'm hoping there is some
> way
> to avoid a massive rewrite/refactoring to make it work with me. Thanks
> again!


There aren't any easy answers, but this might point you in the right
direction:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/...tid=1741212660

Keep in mind that any event listeners added within the scope of a component
will be destroyed when the component is destroyed.

so this.addEventListener=OK
that.addEventListener=may not be

HTH;

Amy

Thank you very much, I'll check it out. I appreciate the assistance!

"bill.cabral" <webforumsuser@macromedia.com> wrote in message
news:gdsovt$re0$1@forums.macromedia.com...
> Thank you very much, I'll check it out. I appreciate the assistance!

You're welcome :-)