New Row Layout behaviour is not acceptable

On porting a QML 1 App to QML 2 I found it rather difficult to work with the new row behavior.

I found that the row / container item of row does call Component.onCompleted when all "visible" items are layouted, while the invisible items are still positioned at 0,0 and kept at a size of 0x0. Those invisible items are then handled "later".

I need to have it all ready on "onCompleted" since I need to do calculations (pageing, scrolling) depending on the variable width of the row (and i.e. do culling / caching regarding the x position within each item)

Is there any way to reenable the "old" behavior?