Retaining emoticons of previous chat conversation

Hi All,

I am new to flex. I am developing a chat application. I am using TLF for adding emoticons to my chat conversation. Problem is when I send a new message, the emoticons of previous chats are removed. Basically, while sending a message, I am adding all my chat content as SpanElement (for plain text) and InlineGraphicElement (for emoticons) and adding them to a ParagraphElement which is added to TextFlow. When I send a new message I want to retrieve the previous chat content and add it to new one, but while doing this I am not getting how to retrieve inline emoticons from the TextFlow. Please help.

Thanks.