Comments on: PSA: Bindable Setters Don’t Fire!

By: nwebb » One Reason Why Your Flex Getter May Not Execute

nwebb » One Reason Why Your Flex Getter May Not Execute — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:29:07 +0000

[...] ensures that the setter is run regardless. The issue was also reported by Tony Hillerson ( thanks to Tony and the guys who left comments for identifying the cause and saving me from [...]

By: Ryan Bell

Ryan Bell — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:05:06 +0000

Maybe you figured this out already, but I just found another (perhaps better) workaround for this as I was reading Adobe’s Flex Binding documentation.

Supposedly, if you specify a custom binding event instead of letting Flex manage it by generating its own propertyChange event, it will skip the check to to see if the new value matches the current value, and will call the setter regardless. The setter would then be responsible for determining if a change really had occurred and dispatching the custom binding event itself.

[Bindable(event="myPropChange")]

By: Ryan Bell

Ryan Bell — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:42:21 +0000

I’m glad you documented this. I just ran into this today here down the block in a setter that wasn’t causing a component to update itself as expected. My workaround: make a public “refresh()” method on the component, and move all update logic from the setter to that method. Then in addition to having the setter call refresh(), I call it externally if the property is already set to the object reference I want it to use. There are probably more elegant ways of doing this but it works…

By: mika

mika — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:13:11 +0000

Thanks for information.

By: Luke Bayes

Luke Bayes — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 19:54:20 +0000

It’s actually even worse if your properties contain references to objects rather than simply primitive values.

If someone changed a value on the object, and then calls the setter hoping to trigger an update, none will come. You have to first set it to null, then re-set the reference.

Kind of frustrating, but probably not as frustrating as an extremely slow, choppy experience….

By: ericsoco

ericsoco — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 23:32:07 +0000

ack. spent the whole afternoon on this problem. it’s definitely a bug IMHO; ‘bug’ may not be exactly the right word, perhaps it’s better to say “bad design decision” on the part of Adobe.

take, for example, a setter that is expecting an Array. i set the array property to arrayX; the setter fires. i modify arrayX — for example, i push something into it — and again set the array property to arrayX. the setter doesn’t fire, the display that’s binding that array property doesn’t update.

not good.