Question

I have an event driven flash program. I need to be able to call removeChild() if and only if an object is a child. getChildByName() and most other functions don’t seem to allow for this and if you call removeChild() on an object that isn’t a child it will throw an error. I suppose an option may be to catch the thrown error and just ignore it, but that seems like a bad solution.

Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

To avoid errors I normally just wrap removeChild() in if(parent):

if(sprite.parent)
    sprite.parent.removeChild(sprite);

If the sprite doesn’t have a parent, null will be given in the if() meaning removeChild() won’t be called.

removeChild() is also run from the parent of the child (which we have already confirmed exists in the if() statement around it). This means the targeted parent is always the owner of the child.

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parent is often forgotten but is an extremely powerful property for simplifying all DisplayList related operations.