Combobox without flex compiles but not visible

1

Am new to AS3/Flex & Flash, and need to develop a flash form for an embedded device where space is of the essence. The form will consist of a file picker and combobox, am starting with the combobox.

First thing I’ve noticed is that Flex’s mx/Combobox, with almost no other functionality, seems to compile to a really large .swf, like 200K. But at first when I tried to compile a pure Actionscript solution, “import fl.controls.ComboBox;” resulted in a compile error.

Found a workaround “How to Use Flash CS3’s V3 Components in Flex Builder” at http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000253.html Using the technique described there I created a ComboBox.swc and placed this in Flex’s frameworks/libs directory (also did this with corelib.swc so that I will have access to JSON functionality, but first things first ;), and then could compile a ComboBoxExample.as file.

Problem is, though it compiles, it doesn’t display a combobox (whereas the commented out setupTextField() method results in a visible textField). Would appreciate pointers as to what I might be doing wrong. Thanks in advance. You might recognize sample code from more than one example incorporated in the following:


package 
{
    import fl.controls.ComboBox;
    import fl.data.DataProvider;
    import flash.display.Sprite
    import flash.events.Event;
    import flash.text.TextField;
    import flash.text.TextFieldAutoSize;
    
    public class ComboBoxExample extends Sprite
    {
        private var aCb:ComboBox;
        private var tf:TextField;
        
        public function ComboBoxExample() {
          setupComboBox();
          //setupTextField();
        }

        private function setupTextField():void {
            tf = new TextField();
            tf.x = 15;
            tf.y = 15;
            tf.text = root.loaderInfo.loaderURL;
            tf.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT;
            addChild(tf);
        }

        private function setupComboBox():void {
        var sfUniversities:Array = new Array(
          {label:"University of California, Berkeley", 
                data:"http://www.berkeley.edu/"},
          {label:"University of San Francisco", 
                data:"http://www.usfca.edu/"},
          {label:"San Francisco State University", 
                data:"http://www.sfsu.edu/"},
          {label:"California State University, East Bay", 
                data:"http://www.csuhayward.edu/"},
          {label:"Stanford University", data:"http://www.stanford.edu/"},
          {label:"University of Santa Clara", data:"http://www.scu.edu/"},
          {label:"San Jose State University", data:"http://www.sjsu.edu/"}
        );

        aCb = new ComboBox();
        aCb.dropdownWidth = 210;
        aCb.width = 200; 
        aCb.move(20, 20);
        aCb.prompt = "San Francisco Area Universities";
        aCb.dataProvider = new DataProvider(sfUniversities);
        //aCb.addEventListener(Event.CHANGE, changeHandler);
        addChild(aCb);
        aCb.open();        
        }
    }
}