Question

Simple drag and drop application where mc is dragged out of one parent mc and dropped into another parent mc.
All works OK until I added 2 text boxes to the mc’s — one is a non-selectable dynamic text box (a label) which is set by the code, the other is selectable input text that the user can amend.

The text boxes cause some problems:

1. Finger cursor disappears when user hovers over the section of the mc that contains the text fields (even non-selectable text??)
2. When the user trys to drag the mc by inadvertantly click-dragging anywhere within both text areas it causes this error: TypeError: Error #1034: Type Coercion failed: cannot convert flash.text::TextField@2374a381 to flash.display.MovieClip (same error appears for both text boxes)
3. The input text box may confuse the user – how do they sometimes click to drag and sometimes click to amend? I’m thinking the input text needs to be clearly a non-click-drag ‘zone’ in the mc. (hope that makes sense)

Not sure, but maybe I need to create an overlay area within the mc that is click-detected for the drag?
Any other suggestions?

Here’s the relevant bits of code:

var itemArray:Array = [
                    {iname:"police",ititle:"POLICE OFFICER"},
                    {iname:"insurance_assessor",ititle:"INSURANCE ASSESSOR"},
                    {iname:"estimator",ititle:"ESTIMATOR"}
                    ];
for (var i:int=0; i < itemArray.length; i++) 
{ 
 var itemname:String = itemArray[i].iname;
 var curritem:MovieClip = MovieClip(scrollitems.getChildByName(itemname)); 
 if (curritem != null) 
 { 
   curritem.ititle.text = itemArray[i].ititle;
   curritem.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, pickUp); 
   curritem.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, dropIt); 
   curritem.buttonMode = true; 
 }
}

function pickUp(event:MouseEvent):void
{
  var dragIt:MovieClip = MovieClip(event.target);   //type casting
  var dragPoint:Point = dragIt.parent.localToGlobal(new Point(dragIt.x,dragIt.y));
  dragIt.parent.removeChild(dragIt); // remove item from current parent mc
  stage.addChild(dragIt); //temp add to stage
  dragIt.x = dragPoint.x;
  dragIt.y = dragPoint.y;
  dragIt.startDrag();
}

Answer 1

The problem that you have is that the Textfields are mouseEnabled. The label field mouseEnabled property should be set to false , as for the other TextField I can think of two solutions.

• The simpler approach (as you already mention ) could be to create a draggable hitArea within your mc , similar to the top of a window on a desktop , you could add your event listeners to this area so that the mc can only be dragged from there.

• A second approach could be to set your mc’s mouseChildren property to false on a MouseDown and back to true on a MouseUp. This shouldn’t interfere with a user entering text in your input textfield.