On Flex States vs Subclassing/Inheritance

Question

I think I'm overusing the Flex states model. The way the Spark architecture teaches it, states should mainly be used for changing the visual appearance of a certain component. However, being overly excited about the simplicity of using Flex states, and also willing to reuse existing object instances at runtime, I made my components really "thick", injecting different view models, as well as other stuff, based on a certain state change. This created a bunch of problems with synchronization, so I decided to subclass and specialize instead of relying on states that much.

In general, as a rule of thumb, where should the boundary between states and subclassing be put?

Answer 1

Well, from what I understand, you have a huge view that you now want to use inheritance to split it up? Won't that still make your component heavy and hard to manage?

The better solution here is to use composition, not inheritance. Create new, self-managing and small components that come as a whole into a larger one. There really shouldn't be a 'boundary between states and subclassing' because they do 2 completely different things. One is for view based changes while the other is to add functionality.

I think you're just really mixing up your OOP concepts and should really stop what you're doing and go over the theory a bit before continuing. If you continue on your current path, you'll end up where you're heading; spaghetti code.