Your timing is INCREDIBLE. One day after you posted, I needed to implement a timer.
Thanks!!!

Approach used by the Adobe guys who wrote Apprise ( http://code.google.com/p/apprise ) …

Store the timer instance in the model.
Within an initialisation command:
* Create the timer instance
* Add an event listener using an inline or anonymous function that simply creates and dispatches a Cairngorm event
* start the timer

http://code.google.com/p/apprise/source/browse/trunk/src/com/adobe/apprise/commands/InitCommand.as

I’m not a fan of inline functions (http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2006/07/as3_weakly_refe.html), but if a single instance of the timer is created that lives for the life of the application, I guess should be ok. Better than a handler in Main.mxml imo.

1 )Declare the Timer object in the ModelLocator class as a member variable.

2) In my Main.mxml class I called timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, timerHandler, false, 0, true) in my creationComplete method.

3) And then defined the timerHandler() method in Main.mxml.

That seems to be the sane thing to do
Regards,
Sunil

I just ordered your Air book from Amazon last night, what a co-inky-dink that I ended up on this blog post of yours today looking for some insight.

Above someone else commented that they are finding it difficult to use a Timer in a Cairngorm project. I am working on my first Cairngorm project and have come to the same conclusion with the Timer object and Cairngorm:

I’m putting a Timer in my ModelLocator, so I can repeatedly fetch some data from an HTTPService. My question is where should I put the TimerEvent handler? My first thought was to also put the event handler method in the ModelLocator class.

I did some searching to see if anyone has talked about this sort of thing, and ended up here
It seems natural to put the Timer object, in the ModelLocator, so my app’s components can turn the timer off, change the timer interval, etc… but for some reason it doesn’t feel right to put the TimerEvent handler in the ModelLocator. Thought’s anyone?

Cheers,
Sunil