Flex does not provide a way to temporarily disable event listeners and re-enable them later.  You may want to do this to prevent endless loops.  For example, when some code modifies the selectedIndex of a List, an event is fired.  If you have a listener that reacts to the event, you may need a way of suppressing the listener's response under certain conditions.  You have two choices:

• Couple the listener to the code that generates the event, so it knows when to ignore the event.  This defeats one of the purposes of event-driven programming, separation of concerns.
• Suppress the event dispatch

My gift to you today, dear reader, is the EventManager class.  This class remembers all event listeners assigned to an EventDispatcher, and can remove or re-instate those listeners with a single method call.

package events {
    import flash.events.EventDispatcher;
    
    public class EventManager {
        private var dispatcher:EventDispatcher;
        private var type:String;
        private var listener:Function;
        private var useCapture:Boolean;
        private var priority:int;
        private var useWeakReference:Boolean;
        
        public function EventManager(dispatcher:EventDispatcher, type:String, listener:Function, useCapture:Boolean, priority:int, useWeakReference:Boolean) {
            this.dispatcher = dispatcher;
            this.type = type;
            this.listener = listener;
            this.useCapture = useCapture;
            this.priority = priority;
            this.useWeakReference = useWeakReference;
        }
        
        private static function disableFn(item:*, index:int, array:Array):void {
            var em:EventManager = EventManager(item);
            em.dispatcher.removeEventListener(em.type, em.listener, em.useCapture);
        }
        
        public static function disableAll(listeners:Array):void {
            listeners.forEach(disableFn);
        }
        
        private static function enableFn(item:*, index:int, array:Array):void {
            var em:EventManager = EventManager(item);
            em.dispatcher.addEventListener(em.type, em.listener, em.useCapture, em.priority, em.useWeakReference);
        }
        
        public static function enableAll(listeners:Array):void {
            listeners.forEach(enableFn);
        }
    }
}

Here is how you could use EventManager:

package {
    public class EMDemo extends ComboBox {
        private var listeners:Array = new Array();
    	
    	override public function addEventListener(type:String, listener:Function, useCapture:Boolean = false, priority:int = 0, useWeakReference:Boolean = false):void {
    	    super.addEventListener(type, listener, useCapture, priority, useWeakReference);
    	    listeners.push(new EventManager(this, type, listener, useCapture, priority, useWeakReference));
    	}
        		
        /** Prevent update events from being issued */
        public function quietlySetIndex(newIndex:int):void {
            EventManager.disableAll(listeners);
            selectedIndex = newIndex;
            EventManager.enableAll(listeners);
        }
    }
}

Read more from Mike Slinn.