Question

I’m quite ashemed to ask this question here because I’m sure that I’m missing something very basic. I’m not even sure what should be the correct title for this question.

Let’s say that I’ve a button object (instance of Flip) and a coin object (instance of Coin) on the stage. The coin object has two frames: one showing Heads and one for Tails.

MyCoin class is as following:

package
{
    import flash.display.MovieClip;

    public class Coin extends MovieClip
    {
        protected var _coinFace:uint;

        public function Coin()
        {
            stop();
        }

        public function get coinFace():uint {
            return _coinFace;
        }

        public function set coinFace(value:uint):void {
            _coinFace = value;
        }

        public function show():void {
            gotoAndStop(_coinFace);
        }
    }
}

Objective: When user clicks the button, the coin should flip and show a random coinFace. I’ve added an eventListener to the Flip class as follows:

public function Flip()
    {
        this.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onMouseClick);
    }

Problem: How do I reach the coin object on the screen via onMouseClick function? Let’s say that the object on the stage has instance name of myCoin. I suppose that had I not done this with an external class and simply used actions from the frame I could just use the instance name as a variable. I couldn’t figure to do the same it in an external class. Do I first create the object which is already on the stage?

Answer 1

Where you create the instance of each, the flip object needs to be passed an instance of the coin object.

var myCoin:Coin = new Coin();
var myFlip:Flip = new Flip(myCoin);

Then inside the Flip class:

private var _coin:Coin;
public function Flip(coin:Coin) {
    _coin = coin;
    this.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onMouseClick);
}

private function onMouseClick(e:MouseEvent):void {
    _coin.gotoAndStop(2); // Or what ever needs to be done to the coin on click
}

Alternatively, depending on the complexity of the overall structure, you can a build a control class that acts as a link between the two.