Question

I have created a .fla in Flash professional with several rectangles. Each rectangle is a different color and is a separate movie clip. I then have a movie clip (RectContainer) with contains all the rectangles inside of it, and I have added ‘AS Linkage’ so I can create an instance of this container class in Flash builder (after I’ve exported as a .swc).

My question is this. What if I wanted to add a variable to each rectangle and how could I read this value from Flash builder.

For example, I want to add a string variable to the red rectangle with the word “red” , the blue rectangle with “blue” etc.

I then want to add listeners to the rectangles, so when they are clicked I can get the color string of the rectangle that was clicked.

for (var i:int = 0; i < rectContainer.numChildren; i++) {
    rectContainer.getChildAt(i).addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, fl_Click);
}

function fl_click(event:MouseEvent):void
{
    event.currentTarget. ???
}

Answer 1

You should make a custom class for your rectangles to inherit from (or draw your rectangles in the custom class and forgo the .fla altogether). You can then give a public property to hold the value you desire, create any common functions like a click handler that does something with the color label.

public class MyRectangle extends Sprite {
    public var label:String;

    public function MyRectangle(){
        this.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, clickHandler,false,0,true);
    }

    private function clickHandler(e:MouseEvent):void {
        trace(label);
    }
}

For your rectangles, if in the flash IDE, in their symbol properties put your custom class as the base class.