MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-COMPONENTS LANGUAGE Reference page 766

A live preview of each List instance on the Stage reflects changes made to parameters in the
Property inspector or Component inspector during authoring.
When you add the List component to an application, you can use the Accessibility panel to
make it accessible to screen readers. First, you must add the following line of code to
enable accessibility:
mx.accessibility.ListAccImpl.enableAccessibility();
You enable accessibility for a component only once, regardless of how many instances the
component has. For more information, see Chapter 19, "Creating Accessible Content," in
Using Flash.
Using the List component
You can set up a list so that users can make either single or multiple selections. For example, a
user visiting an e-commerce website needs to select which item to buy. There are 30 items,
and the user scrolls through a list and selects one by clicking it.
You can also design a list that uses custom movie clips as rows so you can display more
information to the user. For example, in an e-mail application, each mailbox could be a List
component and each row could have icons to indicate priority and status.
Understanding the design of the List component
When you design an application with the List component, or any component that extends the
List class, it is helpful to understand how the list was designed. The following are some
fundamental assumptions and requirements that Macromedia used when developing the
List class:
Keep it small, fast, and simple.
Don't make something more complicated than absolutely necessary. This was the prime
design directive. Most of the requirements listed below are based on this directive.
Lists have uniform row heights.
Every row must be the same height; the height can be set during authoring or at runtime.
Lists must scale to thousands of records.
762 List component