Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Wednesday, September 12, 2007    
UPDATE: MORON ALERT!!!

I had a simple typo & that was causing all of this. Seemed silly that the below would have been true. Sorry. A true noob moment here.


I am plugging along just fine with AS3 so far & loving a lot of it. This discovery phase is pretty fun, stumbling to find AS2-like matches and utilizing a lot of new stuff is proving to be pretty exciting. A great way to learn instead of simply reading something somewhere or copy&paste. Anyway, I am loading assets into my main document class, and came across something interesting that I saw some coverage about online, but what I read didn't quite match with what I was experiencing.

TypeError: Error #1010: A term is undefined and has no properties. at net.ericd.app::Application/::onClipLoaded()
Hmmm. Kind of helpful, but I'd like it to be a little more verbose here. So I checked what was happening. I created three movieclips ahead of time and loaded content (SWFs) into them. These are then assigned to variables I can easily reference later, for calling methods, etc. However, if the clip is not on the displayList & you attempt to access anything within it/modify it, you get this error. What I was doing was making sure that the content loaded but was not yet displayed (not on displayList); I wanted contents within a clip resized & positioned correctly before adding to the displayList. Trying to access movieclips within the container that wasn't on the displayList barfed for me.

I would like to have the contents in that container set up ahead of time, so then I can just add it to the displayList and have it work... but I can't. might a solution be to addChild for it, set things up how I'd like & then remove it right away? That seems pretty hackish to me... or I can just set the things up AFTER I eventually add it to the displayList.

What is the best approach for something like this?


3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...
 

“You have a couple of options.

1) Use hasChild():

if(myClip.hasChild(myChildClip))
{
// gravy
}
else
{
// add child
}

2) A similar potential is to use try/catch. Syntax is like so:

try
{
// whatever code block you need. if any part of the code fails, proceed to catch.
}
catch($error1:Error)
{
// okay, there was an error above. let's try this code block.
}
catch($error2:Error)
{
// you can keep adding catches forever if you want.
}”
 
Anonymous Mike J said...
 

“By the way, not sure if you're using "MovieClip" in the generic sense as a container or not, but since switching to AS3 I haven't used a single proper MovieClip even once in an application.

I use Shape if I just need a drawing canvas ( like a decorator ) and Sprite if I need a container - they're much lighter weight and I can't think of many circumstances where I'd want something with an actual timeline of it's own anymore.

Even if you're loading a swf, you should be able to place it inside a Sprite as a container. =)”
 
Blogger e.dolecki said...
 

“mike,

agreed. i changed that to Sprite right after i posted this stuff. i haven't used Shape yet, I've been using Sprite for that too.”
 
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