How to make an object of a class?

programming flash
1

Hi all!

I am still quite new to AS3, but trying to learn the essentials.

What I have trouble with is this:

I have a box on the stage (or frame 1 in timeline). Inside this box I made a dynamic textfield. I made a movieclip of these two together and called it watch (instance name). Also exported to actionscript with name of the class StopWatch.

Now, in actions in the timeline I do this:

import classes.stopwatch.StopWatch;

var watch:StopWatch = new StopWatch();  
watch.setTimerStart();

I made StopWatch as an own class. It looks like this:


package classes.stopwatch {
        
    import flash.utils.Timer;
    import flash.events.TimerEvent;
    import flash.events.Event;
    
    public class StopWatch
    {
        private var timer:Timer;
        public var timeToday:Number;
        private var _root:Object;
        
        public function StopWatch()
        {
            //_root = MovieClip(root);
            //timer = new Timer(1); // ticks every 1 millisecond
        }
        
        public function setTimerStart():void
        {
            
            //set the time in milliseconds
            timer = new Timer(10);
            timer.addEventListener("timer", timerHandler);
            timer.start();
        }    
        
        public function timerHandler(eventArgs:TimerEvent):void {
            //trace("Total time: " + timer.currentCount + timer.delay);
            timeToday = timer.currentCount * timer.delay;
            //trace(timeToday);
            this.displayTime.text = "Time: " + String(timeToday);
            //timer.removeEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE, completeHandler);
            //var d:Date = new Date(0);
                //d.setMilliseconds(timer.currentCount);

            //trace( d.getMilliseconds());
            //trace("counting has finished");
            
        }
        
        public function setTimerStop(stopTime:Number):void
        {
            //timer.reset(delay, count);
            timer = new Timer(stopTime, 1); //(tid til stop, antall ganger)
            timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE, completeHandler);            
        }
        
        public function completeHandler(event:TimerEvent):void {
            timer.removeEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE, completeHandler);
            trace("counting has finished");
        }
        
        
        public function start():void
        {
            timer.start();
        }
        
        public function getTimeStamp():int // returns timestamp in milliseconds
        {
            return timer.currentCount * timer.delay;
        }
    
        public function reset():void // resets the stopwatch
        {
            timer.removeEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE, completeHandler);
            timer.reset();
        }
       
    }
}

Now I don’t use all of this yet, and it is not important. What I can’t do is call
this.displayTime.text = "Time: " + String(timeToday);

Actually I get an error which says that setTimerStart(); does not exist or something around those lines. If you need an exact error msg I can get that for you later.

So, what do I do to be able to use the textfield from the StopWatch class?