I have been tearing my hair out with the behaviour of nested MCs made in the timeline.
I have a button with a nested MC which acts as a “tooltip”. A design I have used before in Buttons in Flash MX.
But I dont want the tooltip MC to respond to mouse events.
So I used “parentMC.tooltipMC.mouseEnabled = false”.
But it did not work.
I tried with AS in the timeline, in a document Class, and placing the art on the stage manually and with script.
None of these approaches worked.
So I disabled the parentMC too. And placed another “dummyMC” in the parentMC with mouseEnabled = true to act as the “button”.
And that worked.
With my limited knowledge of AS I assume the “mouseEnabled”, or “mouseChildren” properties are restricted to objects placed programmatically?
Along the way I found a couple of other issues…
The project Im working on places the final SWF on a Papervision Plane. If I constructed the event listener like this:
parentMC.addEventListener(MouseEvent.ROLL_OVER, TurnOver);
the mouse functionality was lost once in Papervision.
However, if I used this construction:
parentMC.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, TurnOver);
the mouse functionality was preserved. Why?
In my original artwork the “tooltipMC” did not exist in frame 1 of the “parentMC”. The swf would not compile and I got TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference.
After some time on the web I found similar problems with nested MCs, related to the use of gotoAndPlay() and gotoAndStop() e.g. http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=159449
A bug report is posted here: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-43
It seems to be due to the order in which Flash executes http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2113726&postcount=358
Now Im not the greatest AS guy around, so I solved the problem by ensuring the “tooltipMC” was present in frame 1 of the “parentMC” with an Alpha of zero, so Flash could “see” it, but a human could not.
