Flex: Determine if a component is showing

Question

What is the best way to determine if a component in Flex/Flash is showing on the user's screen? I'm looking for an analog to Java's Component.isShowing() method.

The show and hide events fire for visibility, and this seems to work for the first descendant of a ViewStack component, but not further down the display tree.

Answer 1

... or avoiding recursion:

public static function isVisible(obj:DisplayObject):Boolean
{
    while (obj && obj.visible && obj !== Application.application)
    {
        obj = obj.parent;
    }
    return obj && obj.visible;
}