Dynamic Instance Names of TextFields - A work around

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 20:08:00 GMT

As I am starting to get back into heavy Flash development after my 5+ year hiatus, I see that Macromedia has added quite a lot of interesting concepts to the newer versions of ActionScript.

But the purpose of this post is to outline that Macromedia (err now Adobe) still has a lot of work to do on their ActionScript engine, specifically with Dynamic Instance naming conventions (and new-object intellisense would really be nice by now, after all of these years). I am assuming you know flash, a little bit. At least to the level of knowing that you need set an InstanceName of a Symbol, in order to be able to edit its properties at runtime.

I just spent too much time today trying to figure out why my code wasn't working. I am creating numerous dynamic TextFields, but I need to be able to access them for updates in code. And to complicate things, the TextFields will be loaded from different XML files - meaning they will have different InstanceNames.

You usually can create a dynamic instance name by using the old-school method of hardCodedName[variable] or the even older eval("hardCodedName" + variable) method. For example, say I want to create a new movie into a dynamic variable made up of an integer I have in a for i++ loop:

for (int i = 0; i < total; i++)
{
  loadMovie( "myMovie" + i + ".swf", _root.myMovie[ i ] );
}

Or...

for (int i = 0; i < total; i++)
{
  loadMovie( "myMovie" + i + ".swf", _root.eval("myMovie" + i) );
}

Both of these examples should result in loading myMovie0.swf into the dynamic variable name of /level0/myMovie0 (or _root.myMovie0 per dot-syntax).

What I found today is that when using some of the newer ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0 functions, they do not honor these methods completely. I had to use a mixture of the two examples above to get it work, and actually could not use either method when creating the object! This is the craziest thing I've seen to where eval() works in referencing the object, but does not work in the creation of the object.

var _root.totalCount:Number = 0;
function CreateMenuItem(Text:String, Href:String, Title:String, Spacer:Boolean)
{
    // create the symbol at the last Y position we are tracking
    this.createTextField("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount
        , _root.totalCount, _root.textXpos, _root.lastYpos, _root.textWidth, _root.textHeight);
    eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).wordWrap = true;
    eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).multiline = true;
    eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).border = false;
    eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).type = "dynamic";
    eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).antiAliasType = "advanced";
    
    textFormat = new TextFormat();
    textFormat.color = 0xffffff;
    textFormat.size = 12;
    textFormat.font = "Futura Condensed";
    
    if (Spacer != true)
    {
      formatText.url = Href;
    }
    
    if (Text.length > 0)
    {
        eval("movFlyoutText" +  _root.totalCount).text = Text;
    }
    else
    {
        eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).text = " ";
    }
    
    eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount).setTextFormat(textFormat);
    
    // reset some vars
    var tmp:Number = eval("movFlyoutText" + _root.totalCount)._height;
    _root.lastYpos = _root.lastYpos + tmp;
    
    _root.totalCount++;
}

Above is the code I wrote today, to where I can not use [] reference or the eval() reference to get the TextField created properly using the newer createTextFieldmethod. But in other methods throughout my code, using the [] reference works at the baseline. Go figure.

And as mentioned above, I can not use brackets[] when referencing the object either to set its properties! I had to use eval(). Man, how ugly is this code? I'm open to other suggestions.

Eric Duncan : Computer Programming, Flash

Dynamic Instance Names of TextFields - A work around