title: Flex: Duplicating instance of an image
body: <p>I have a drag and drop handler in my Flex application. The drag proxy, or the 'ghost' image to be displayed while dragging, must be loaded before I drag, and that takes some time. How can I make it load immediately or preload? One solution is to duplicate the image, but as far as I know, image objects can't be duplicated without creating another variable, which must still take some time to load.</p>
  
  <p>Perhaps this code will illustrate it better:</p>
  
  <pre><code>public function DragApp (e : MouseEvent) : void {
      var dragInitiator : Image = e.currentTarget as Image;
      var dragSource : DragSource = new DragSource ();
  
      var dragProxy : Image = new Image ();
      dragProxy.source = e.currentTarget.source; // Won't work unless image is embedded
      dragProxy.load (e.currentTarget.source); // Must load
  
      setTimeout (DragManager.doDrag, 350, dragInitiator, dragSource, e, dragProxy);
  }
  </code></pre>