Comments on: Is the MovieClip.onLoad Event Broken?

by: David Stiller

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 00:22:52 +0000

To Laurie …

Wow, I think this might be the longest I’ve taken to reply to a comment. Sorry about that! And thanks for the happy comment. Glad to help.

To davies …

Thanks to you too!

by: davies

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 08:21:20 +0000

this site is very resource full!

by: Laurie

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 21:10:41 +0000

I just can’t say how grateful I am for seeing this. I have been struggling to see how MovieClip.onLoad might work from the timeline (and thus find a way to avoid onClipEven(Load)) for 18 months or more. A big thank you.

by: NSurveyor

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 06:37:17 +0000

This turned out to be rather useful. On the KEYFRAMER forum, it was inquired if you can put code (like an event handler assignment) before actually instantiating a clip. Using the space hack, I managed to get it to work.

http://www.keyframer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=392

by: David Stiller

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 15:41:55 +0000

myIP,

Interesting question. Honestly, I’m not sure how to answer it. The MovieClip.onLoad event is dispatched when the movie clip in question first appears on the timeline (even virtually, if the clip is attached at runtime). So it’s not really a matter of ensuring that child clips have loaded — they “ship with the SWF,” so to speak; you can count on it they’ll load — it’s really more about initializing a movie clip when it first appears. If you wanted to ensure that child clips were initialized … that might be something. But even there, depending on the complexity of your app, you might just dispatch your own event onInit, say, if it came to that.

by: myIP

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 18:01:34 +0000

I understand that you need to associate the symbol with a class, but is it possible to associate the parent’s symbol instead of the child’s symbol? For an example, if I had a symbol named “Engine” that had 4 instances of “Piston” symbols inside of it and wanted to make sure that all 4 pistons are loaded before assigning them with code, would it be safe to just associate the Engine symbol with a class? I think this question is starting to head out of scope with the article of yours and is heading into the scope of how Flash loads symbols, which would be a nice subject for an article

by: David Stiller

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 14:52:21 +0000

Woo hoo! This is funny, considering my “devil in the blah blah blahs” remark. It’s those darned details, I tell ya! I don’t know how I messed up those spaces.

by: eRez

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 14:41:35 +0000

now it works 4 me!!
thanks,
eRez

by: David Stiller

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 13:07:01 +0000

eErez,

doesn’t work for me

Two issues, here. First, a mistake on my part. For some reason, a number of words got mashed together in this article (spaces arbitrarily missing), which NSurveyor discovered. I thought I’d caught them all, but there was still one in the code that goes inside the class. The word “functiononLoad” should have been “function onLoad” (I’ve since corrected the article).

Second, you changed the location of the file. You correctly linked to mx.utils.FixOnLoad in your Linkage… setting, but that package would also need to go into the class, then. This existing code …

class FixOnLoad extends MovieClip {

… would become …

class mx.utils.FixOnLoad extends MovieClip {

by: eRez

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 07:43:52 +0000

doesn’t work for me
first - as this class might be handy in many cases, i thought why have it available only for my current project instead of having it available for all my future projects as well? so i saved the as file (after i copy-pasted your code into it as is) in “C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash 8\en\Configuration\Classes\mx\utils” and named it ‘FixOnLoad.as’, then linked my movie clip in the library to ‘mx.utils.FixOnLoad’. when i tested my movie i got the following errors:

**Error** C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash 8\en\Configuration\Classes\mx\utils\FixOnLoad.as: Line 1: The class being compiled, ‘FixOnLoad’, does not match the class that was imported, ‘mx.utils.FixOnLoad’.
class FixOnLoad extends MovieClip {

**Error** C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash 8\en\Configuration\Classes\mx\utils\FixOnLoad.as: Line 2: A member attribute was used incorrectly.
public functiononLoad():Void {}

**Error** C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash 8\en\Configuration\Classes\mx\utils\FixOnLoad.as: Line 3: A member attribute was used incorrectly.
}

so just to make sure, i saved my as file in the same folder as my fla file (changed the linkage only to ‘FixOnLoad’), and now got only the 2nd and 3rd errors i had before.
where did i go wrong?

ps - just for the record, your ‘Low down dirty trick’ did the work