# TextArea listeners not working?

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/textarea-listeners-not-working/254724>\
**Category:** flash\
**Created:** [March 14, 2008, 4:49pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/textarea-listeners-not-working/254724 "2008-03-14T16:49:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![yenemy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/f475e1/32.png) [@yenemy](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/yenemy)\
**Post date:** [March 14, 2008, 4:49pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/textarea-listeners-not-working/254724/1 "2008-03-14T16:49:31Z")

</div>

So… what am I doing wrong here? Or is the TextArea CHANGE event the same as the TextField CHANGE event (i.e., only triggered when a user changes the text, not AS)?

Here’s a brief explanation of what I’m trying here:

FLVPlayback component streaming audio (don’t ask)  
FLVPlaybackCaptioning component sending caption data (from an XML) to a TextArea component.

The TextArea has the following set on it:

```auto
capBox.editable = false;
capBox.enabled = true;
capBox.horizontalScrollPolicy = "OFF";
capBox.verticalScrollPolicy = "AUTO";
capBox.wordWrap = true;
capBox.addEventListener(Event.CHANGE, blahblah);

```

but blahblah(event:Event) never gets called; nor does the scrollbar ever activate (or even become visible) unless I fill the TextArea initially with a long htmlText string.

In that case, the scrollbar works properly until the TextArea receives a short caption, then it’ll disable the scrollbar and it never activates again.

For now I’ve reverted to using an Event.ENTER\_FRAME on a regular old TextField and checking the textHeight… which is clumsy as heck, but works.