Comments on: How to Reference Objects Dynamically

by: Tiemen

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:04:52 +0000

Thanks for the reply. I have been doing a LOT of flash lately, making comforting jumps in level, but though I understand what you’re doing, it does not actually make sense. For this example, the variable I want to set is a semi-global one, defined in the main timeline. Flash doesn’t convert the i in the onRelease handler to a static number, which I thought it should when it’s used inside a for loop.

So it writes a handler function like this, which finds when invoked, the out-serviced i variable lying around at 9

d3_mc.onRelease = function() {
var_num = i;
trace(i); // traces 9, which makes sense
}

It should’v been this though:

d3_mc.onRelease = function() {
var_num = 3;
trace(3);
}

So what you mean by scope, is that “i” cannot be used on the right side of the equation inside a function declaration?

by: David Stiller

Thu, 08 May 2008 04:11:53 +0000

Tiemen,

I’m going through my notes, man, and I honestly can’t find (i.e., can’t remember) if I replied to you about the Key event listener. I hope I did! I’ve been going insane lately with ridiculous schedule conflicts.

As for the “lazy code” question, I think it’s an issue of scope. Check out this revision:

for (var i:Number = 1; i < 9; i++) {
  this["d" + i + "_mc"].var_num = i;
  this["d" + i + "_mc"].onRelease = function() {
    trace(this.var_num);
    gotoAndStop(4);
  };
}
I resisted the urge to add strong typing.     But this does what you want.



by: Tiemen
Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:33:50 +0000
well, trust me that the for loop is correct, for i iterates over 8.




by: Tiemen
Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:31:51 +0000
Hmm here's me again with a small silly question.

Why won't this lazy code work?

for (var i:Number = 1; i
  this["d"+ i +"_mc"].onRelease = function() {
    var_num = i;
    trace(var_num);
    gotoAndStop(4);
  }
}

Clicking on any of the 8 buttons traces "9", which pretty much baffles me.


by: Tiemen
Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:31:40 +0000
Next day I had this solved. I still don't understand how this works exactly, as there seem many roads that lead to Rome. The one I used in this case with the createEmptyMovieClip was:

reference = this.createEmptyMovieClip(i +"_mc", this.getNextHighestDepth());
reference._x = something_crazy;

But this one has no (obvious) affiliation with any of the methods you mentioned! I couldn't get a this[] or eval() notation to work within a Key. event anyway...?!


by: Tiemen
Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:37:48 +0000
Incredible… I’ve been stuck for over two hours now on the dynamic creation of movieclips. For some reason 
for (var i:Number = 0; i [code snipped by WordPress]
inside a onKeyUp event really doesn’t want to work. Outside the onKeyUp, it does.

It’s driving me crazy…




by: David Stiller
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:46:38 +0000
P.J.,

This is an issue of scope.  You're declaring a variable named token inside the scope of this function, notify(), yet in the condition of your if statement, you're referencing _root.token which, contrary to your expectations, is trying to reference a completely different token variable; namely, the non-existent one scoped to the main timeline (_root).  Does that make sense?  You've got two token references going, one of which doesn't exist.  The one you're referencing in the condition doesn't exist.

If you want to reference _root as your container object, I recommend you go with the array access operator instead:

function notify() {
  for (n=1;n<7;n++) {
    if (_root.jv_mc.hitTest(_root["tkn" + n]) {
      notice_mc.gotoAndPlay(2);
    }
  }
}


by: P.J.
Sun, 23 Mar 2008 10:50:52 +0000
I don't seem to have any luck getting variables to work. I have six identical movieclips on the stage and I would like to include them all in certain functions/statements. Right now, I had to settle for writing out an identical statement for each instance and that works fine. But it's very time consuming, especially for more complex if/else statements, and the resulting code is very unwieldy to say the least.

So if the movieclips are named tkn1 through tkn6 and I want to execute a certain code whenever any of these clips are intersecting with a movieclip named jv_mc, I tried the following and it did nothing.

function notify() {
  var token:MovieClip;
  for (n=1;n<7;n++) {
    token = eval("tkn"+n)
    //the condition/statement
    if (_root.jv_mc.hitTest(_root.token)) {
      notice_mc.gotoAndPlay(2);
    }
  }
}


by: David Stiller
Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:15:34 +0000
Billy,
Glad to help!  




by: Billy
Sat, 12 Jan 2008 08:38:08 +0000
Thanks, I was trying to group dynamically created movie clips from an XML file so that I could manipulate them as a group without just attaching them into some other movie clip. 
So I went along the lines of using an array and pushing the names into the array but couldn’t figure out how to get the names in the array to affect the actual movie clips until I find this post, again thanks for the write up.