I am always curious about how things
happen. In flash I had a confusion as there is difference in accessing MovieClips
on Timeline and accessing MovieClips in ActionScript. So somewhere on web I found
this answer. I’ve just copy and pasted it here. Thanks to person “x” who
explained this.
In Flash 9 when you create MovieClip
instance on the Timeline and give it an instance name, you are doing two
things:
- You're assigning the name property of the MovieClip instance to be the string equivalent to the instance name provided
- You're creating a variable in the current timeline with the name of the instance name that references that MovieClip instance
Flash does this behind the scenes when you publish your SWF to help you manage your movie clips on the screen. It's important to note that this behavior (specifically #2) is not seen with ActionScript. For Example:
Code:
// my_mc is the instance name of a
movie clip
// created on this timeline
trace(my_mc); // [object MovieClip]
trace(my_mc.name); // my_mc
// create a new movie clip via AS
// add it to my_mc
var another_mc:MovieClip = new
MovieClip();
another_mc.name =
"child_mc";
my_mc.addChild(another_mc);
// instance name not available in
parent timeline
trace(another_mc); // [object
MovieClip]
trace(my_mc.child_mc); // undefined
trace(my_mc.another_mc); //
undefined
You can see that neither the
instance name (name property) nor the variable to which the new
MovieClip created with ActionScript was assigned is referencable through the
movie clip in which it was added (my_mc). This is because another_mc was
created and added to the timeline dynamically. Flash will only save instance
names as variables for movie clips created on the timeline in Flash.
If you want to use an instance name to get a MovieClip (or any DisplayObject) instance from the timeline in which it exists, you can use getChildByName();
If you want to use an instance name to get a MovieClip (or any DisplayObject) instance from the timeline in which it exists, you can use getChildByName();
Code:
trace(my_mc.getChildByName("child_mc"));
// [object MovieClip]);
This will work for all movie clips
despite where or how they were located as long as they are within the
timeline/movie clip from which getChildByName was used.
Enjoy ActionScripting.................
