Duplicate loaded images in AS3

During the creation of the latest changes in my portfolio site, I needed to duplicate a loaded image that has to be placed as a material in papervison3d's cube. We don't have duplicateMovieClip in AS3, so we have to use another technique.

The answer is to use the Loader object after the loading completes.

package {
    import flash.display.Bitmap;
    import flash.display.Loader;
    import flash.display.MovieClip;
    import flash.events.Event;
    import flash.net.URLRequest;
    class ImageLoaderTest {
      private
      var _loader: Loader;
  
      function ImageLoaderTest(): void {
        _loader = new Loader();
        _loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onImageLoad);
        _loader.load(new URLRequest(...));
      }
  
      function onImageLoad(e: Event): void {
        var duplicatedImage1: MovieClip = getDuplicatedImage();
        var duplicatedImage2: MovieClip = getDuplicatedImage();
      }
  
      function getDuplicatedImage(): MovieClip {
        var m: MovieClip = new MovieClip();
        var duplicationBitmap: Bitmap = new Bitmap(Bitmap(_loader.content).bitmapData);
        m.addChild(duplicationBitmap);
        return m;
      }
    }
  }

To duplicate a Display object you could use the following function:

function duplicateDisplayObject(target: DisplayObject, autoAdd: Boolean = false): DisplayObject {
    // create duplicate  
    var targetClass: Class = Object(target).constructor;
    var duplicate: DisplayObject = new targetClass();
    // duplicate properties 
    duplicate.transform = target.transform;
    duplicate.filters = target.filters;
    duplicate.cacheAsBitmap = target.cacheAsBitmap;
    duplicate.opaqueBackground = target.opaqueBackground;
    if (target.scale9Grid) {
      var rect: Rectangle = target.scale9Grid;
      // Flash 9 bug where returned scale9Grid is 20x larger than assigned   
      rect.x /= 20, rect.y /= 20, rect.width /= 20, rect.height /= 20;
      duplicate.scale9Grid = rect;
    }
    // add to target parent's display list   
  
    // if autoAdd was provided as true 
    if (autoAdd && target.parent) {
      target.parent.addChild(duplicate);
    }
    return duplicate;
  }