child of child movie clip are null in imported object from flex to flash right after being created

Question

I have an Movie Clip in Flash that have subobject of button type which has subobject of input text and movie clips. Right after creation core Moveclip all subobject are set to null, when I expect them to be valid objects.

// hierarchy:

// core:MC_Core_design
    // button_1:B_Mybutton
        // text_name   // dynamic text with instance name
        // mc_icon     // movie clip with instance name

var core:MC_Core_design = new MC_Core_design();
addChild(core);
core.button_1.text_name.text = "hello world"; // error: text_name is null
core.button_1.mc_icon.visible = false; // error: mc_icon is null

MC_Core_design was created in Flash and exported to Actionscript. I've done this for button_1 class aswell. The code was written using Flex.

When I comment out both lines that result in error I get correct view of the core Movie clip with all subobject.

How can I set subobject properties right after object creation?

Chris Bos Chris Bos · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-16T18:02:34

You need to listen for the Event.INIT from the class when it is created. (If you are not embedding a symbol using the Embed metatag then Flash takes a few milliseconds to initialize the loaded movieclip). This does not seem to be a problem if the Flash IDE swf/swc does not contain any actionscript)

The issue is sometimes it can be really quick, so it fires the INIT event before you get a chance to attach the event listener to the object. so you can't just attach it after you instantiate the object.

A work around is to embed the swf as a byte array, then use the loader class to load the embedded bytes (This lets you set the event listener before calling load).

e.g.

[Embed(source="assets.swf", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
private var assetBytes:Class;

private var clip:MovieClip;
private var loader:Loader;

public function LoadBytesExample()
{
    loader = new Loader();
    loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.INIT, onAssetLoaded);
    loader.loadBytes(new assetBytes());
}

 private function onAssetLoaded(e:Event):void
 {
     var loader:Loader = (e.currentTarget as LoaderInfo).loader;
     (e.currentTarget as LoaderInfo).removeEventListener(Event.INIT, onAssetLoaded);

      clip = loader.content as MovieClip;
      this.addChild(clip);

      clip.someTextField.text = "HELLO WORLD";
   }

Sorry for the formatting, just wrote that off the top of my head

And the syntax for embedding the symbol (You won't need to load this via a loader as the actionscript in the external swf/swc is stripped).

[Embed(source="assets.swf", symbol="somesymbol")]
private var assetSymbol:Class;

private var clip:MovieClip;

public function LoadSymbolExample()
{
   clip = new assetSymbol();
   clip.sometext.text = "Hello World";
}

child of child movie clip are null in imported object from flex to flash right after being created

2 Answers