Avoiding registering events with multiple movieclips

Man, I couldn’t figure out the best way to phrase this in a title. I guess I need an example:

imagine that you have a lots and lots of the same library item on stage - movieclips - and you want each of them to be clickable. Normally, you would iterate through each of these and register an event listener on MouseEvent.CLICK for each one.

It seems to me that if there are large quantities of these items this could be quite inefficient - on memory mostly - to have all these event listeners.

I’m trying to figure out if there’s a more “central” way to do this, where your main document class just registers once with some kind of central dispatcher using a custom event? Any time ANY of the movieclips are clicked, that fires this custom event and you can just query the event to figure out which clip was clicked.

Each movieclip that is clickable extends an AS class through its linkage, and when clicked, dispatches a custom event.


background: if I’m using the IDE to put a lot of objects on stage, and these objects have linkages to their own custom classes, I don’t want to ALSO have to go into the main document class and have it iterate through these objects to register event listeners on each one. I don’t really want the document class to have that much knowledge about these objects (loose coupling). I’d rather the objects “communicate” through this mediator and not really worry about knowing more about each other than what you can access through the custom event.