TextField Flash class

The TextField class is one of the most basic classes in Flash for dealing with text. The TextField class is designed for dynamic and potentially interactive text. The text can be selectable or not and it supports multiline text and text formatting using basic HTML and CSS. Its inheritance is TextField < InteractiveObject < DisplayObject.

The TextField class is the basis for most of the text manipulation that is performed in Flash or Flex. If you are working in the Flash authoring environment you can also create StaticText objects but these are hard-coded and cannot have their text updated at runtime nor can they interact with user operations.

The TextField class is a special purpose class that is designed only to work with text. It does not support the graphics property so you cannot render into it. Also, because it is not a DisplayObjectContainer you cannot add child objects to it. For this reason, subclasses of TextField are very limited in what they can do. Keep this in mind when examining the inheritance hierarchy of your class. Flex classes such as UITextField, DataGridItemRenderer, and AdvancedDataGridItemRenderer share these limitations.