All Flex components trigger a number of events during their startup procedure. These events indicate when the component is first created, plotted internally, and drawn on the screen. The events also indicate when the component is finished being created and, in the case of containers, when its children are created.

Components are instantiated, added or linked to a parent, and then sized and laid out inside their container. The component creation order is as follows:

The following example shows the major events that are dispatched during a component's creation life cycle:

The creation order is different for containers and components because containers can be the parent of other components or containers. Components within the containers must also go through the creation order. If a container is the parent of another container, the inner container's children must also go through the creation order.

The following example shows the major events that are dispatched during a container's creation life cycle:

After all components are created and drawn, the Application object dispatches an applicationComplete event. This is the last event dispatched during an application startup.

The creation order of multiview containers (navigators) is different from standard containers. By default, all top-level views of the navigator are instantiated. However, Flex creates only the children of the initially visible view. When the user navigates to the other views of the navigator, Flex creates those views' children. For more information on the deferred creation of children of multiview containers, see Using deferred creation.

For a detailed description of the component creation life cycle, see About creating advanced components in Creating and Extending Adobe Flex 3 Components.