I thought I understood the AS3 event scheme: capture, target, bubbling. That events (e.g. MouseEvents) travel from stage to the object clicked on and then back again, and all objects in the display chain receive and can check that event. But it’s also true, it seems, that Interactive Objects in front of others will block and “absorb” events, and those beneath will never hear of the event (unless mouseEnabled for the blocking object is set to false). I don’t understand this (seeming) contradiction.
On the Kirupa forums:
Along with event propagation in ActionScript 3 comes different phases of events with display objects. With propagation, you have events being propagated from display objects to other display objects, such as mouse click events being propagated from children to their parents. This lets clicks within children objects to be recognized by parents (since children make up the contents of their parents, its only natural for the parent to also have those same events). The phases of such an event represent the progression of the event as it makes its way through the parent and child objects.
Events actually start with parent objects (phase 1: capturing), starting with the top most parent (stage) and making its way down to the child where the event originated (phase 2: at target). Then after reaching the child it makes its way back up through all the parents again (phase 3: bubbling).
But also:
Though ActionScript 3 now supports event propagation (capturing, bubbling, etc). Events like mouse events still only occur for one specific target for each individual event. In other words, when you click the mouse button over some objects in a Flash movie, only one of those objects is going to recieve the event even though the mouse is physically over other objects as well.…One important thing to keep in mind is that, in ActionScript 3, mouseEnabled is true by default. This means, without any event handlers or listeners used in a movie, every InteractiveObject instance will capture mouse events and prevent them from reaching any other objects beneath them.
Any clarification much appreciated…
