Comments on: Accessing named MovieClips placed on the stage in Flash CS3 while staying true to OOP best-practices

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:01:53 +0000

Hey man,\n\nCS3 really isn’t a bad tool for dev. I use it everyday and can do a lot of code rather fast.

By: Should I check it or not! Uncheck it, and leave a note « Ramblings

Should I check it or not! Uncheck it, and leave a note « Ramblings — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:12:14 +0000

[...] Accessing named MovieClips placed on the stage in Flash CS3 while staying true to OOP best-practices… I happen to agree with Sarah that the best way to work is to uncheck the checkbox and declare all of your variables yourself. This is the only way that really enforces good practices when you are using classes behind your MovieClips in the library. [...]

By: Matthew

Matthew — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:39:35 +0000

Have you found anyway to get this to work with classes that have optional parameters? I have a class that works perfectly in every way if i use addChild, but if i try to use this method for a stage instance i cannot override the default parameters of my class.

By: Ozan

Ozan — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:55:27 +0000

@Leo

what if I want to display several movie clips (taken from my library) on stage with for loop and assign each of them a unique name like mc1, mc2, mc3, etc.? How can I do that in AS3 and how can I access them for instance to change their position via for loop again?

By: Mims H Wright

Mims H Wright — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:07:22 +0000

@Leo
I’m not sure I understand the question exactly. If you have elements positioned on your stage manually, each one that you need to have specific access to needs an instance name. I suppose that you could work around this by walking through the children in the display list too. If you needed to execute something in a particular order, you could always just place references to all your child MCs into an array and step through them, but you’d still need to give each one an instance name. e.g.
public var foo:MovieClip, bar:MovieClip, baz:MovieClip;
public var allMovieClips:Array;
// in your constructor…
allMovieClips = [foo, bar, baz];

Does that answer your question?

By: Leo

Leo — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:51:08 +0000

Great Post, Thank you, but I have a question, what if I have to have many hand-positioned mcs on stage and they all have to be populated in a specific order, do I have to declare each and every one of them individually in the class or is there a way to loop through them and populate them based on their instance names?

By: Kofi

Kofi — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 06:32:02 +0000

this was always driving me nuts(for more than 2 years)…i used to use public static vars only for name instances. good read..thanks

By: Erik Westra

Erik Westra — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:36:46 +0000

We currently have 2 ways of using Flash elements in our AS projects:

1. Embed the part

This only works if the part does not contain any components. When embedding the AS is removed, so simple stop actions are automatically done with frame labels.

2. Export to SWC

We give the MovieClip a specific class, set the ‘export swc’ check and include the swc in the AS Project. We then can simply extend the MovieClip and add functionality.

Greetz Erik