Flex 3: Hiding elements created by repeater - flex3

Question

I have a repeater that creates a custom component named "Block." I need to make it so that when the user clicks a button, all of the blocks created by the repeater have their visible field set to false (and then true when the button is clicked again).
Here's some of the code I have right now:
<mx:Repeater id="indPositions" dataProvider="{projectPositions}" startingIndex="0">
<components:block height="24"
width="100%" id="thisBlock" visible="true" horizontalScrollPolicy="off"
oneDay="{oneDay}"
/>
</mx:Repeater>
Here's the button the user will click to show/hide the blocks:
<mx:Button id="showHideButton" label="Show Project" x="{addBlock.x + addBlock.width + 2}" click="showProjectSwitch();" />
Here's the function showProjectSwitch():
public function showProjectSwitch():void {
if (showHideButton.label == "Hide Project")
{
showHideButton.label = "Show Project";
indPositions.visible = false;
thisProject.height = 65;
}
else
{
showHideButton.label = "Hide Project";
indPositions.visible = true;
thisProject.height = projectHeight ;
}
}
I tried setting projectRP.visible="true/false", but it didn't work :(
I also tried wrapping a canvas around the repeater, but when I did that... the repeater only ran once despite the fact I have the startingIndex="0" and the count="16". I then removed the canvas tags and the repeater ran the correct number of times.
Anybody able to help me out?

Answer 1

The easiest way to achieve what you want is just to use databinding, same as you did for the "oneDay" value.
<mx:Repeater id="indPositions" dataProvider="{projectPositions}" startingIndex="0">
<components:block height="24"
width="100%" id="thisBlock" visible="true" horizontalScrollPolicy="off"
oneDay="{oneDay}"
visible="{showBlocks}"
/>
</mx:Repeater>
<mx:Boolean id="showBlocks" />
[Edit for additional clarity]
To change the visibility of the blocks, you need to set the value of showBlocks, like so:
showBlocks = true;
or
showBlocks = false;

Answer 2

Here's how i solved it... since the variable name of "thisBlock" is declared every time a block is made, all that information gets stored in an array. After learning this, i was able to create a for each loop in a function that was called when the show/hide button was pressed... the for each loop goes something like this:
for (var I:int = 0; i < dataprovidername.length; i++)
thisBlock[i].visible = true/flase;
Hope that can help somebody else out in the future.