Flex 3 event bubbling set to false.. how to make it bubble then?

I have a flex app with lots of nested views and popup windows.. I'd love to catch all the CHANGE events in the application at the top level.. all of them, simply to notify the user that he has changed something (trust me it makes sense in my app).

Now, I tried to add an event listener in the Application creationComplete handler like this:

private function init()开发者_StackOverflow社区:void {  
    this.addEventListener(flash.events.Event.CHANGE, function f():void {...})
}

but it does not work.. why? I read in the docs that event bubbling for the CHANGE event is set to false before dispatching. How can I change that? Is there any other way to achieve my goal? thanks

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Try listening to events on the SystemManager instead of the Application. As far as I understand, SystemManager sits at the very top of the display list, adding the application, popups and other UI entities as children.

In Flex 3 and below, you can retrieve it via Application.application.systemManager.

Read more on the SystemManager on Deepa's blog: http://iamdeepa.com/blog/?p=11

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I am also having trouble with a group of TextArea controls where I would like to listen for the change event on their container (parent) instead.

What I did in the end was to extend the TextArea class and create a listener for the change event. From the listener I would then dispatch a custom event that could bubble.

public class BubblingTextArea extends TextArea
{
    public function BubblingTextArea()
    {
        super();
        addEventListener(TextOperationEvent.CHANGE, changeHandler);
    }

    private function changeHandler(event:TextOperationEvent):void
    {
        dispatchEvent(new ChangeBubbleEvent(ChangeBubbleEvent.BUBBLE_CHANGE));
    }
}

The custom event:

public class ChangeBubbleEvent extends Event
{
    public static const BUBBLE_CHANGE:String = "bubbleChange";

    public function ChangeBubbleEvent(type:String, bubbles:Boolean=true, cancelable:Boolean=false)
    {
        super(type, bubbles, cancelable);
    }
}

I am sure someone can come up with a more elegant solution since I am still quite new to Flex and AS3 myself.

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As far as I know, PopUps happen outside of the Application's main displayList, so that's probably why you're not seeing bubbling. In this case, you'll need to manually add listeners to popups. The Flash change event does bubble according to the docs: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/events/Event.html#CHANGE

I personally like to use a framework such as RobotLegs or Parsley.

The basic idea is that each view and popup gets a mediator. The mediator's job is to communicate between the view and the command/model. Those mediators can listen directly to the view and the view's components.