I recently discovered something interesting with using FlexBuilder for Actionscript projects. I would embed a MovieClip symbol from a swf, but I would get compiler errors when using MovieClip methods on the symbol. Very frustrated, I tried everything I could think of, but no luck. Finally, I started tracing out the symbols type using the is keyword and found out FlexBuilder is converting the MovieClip into a Sprite. It would appear that if there is only one frame in the symbol it becomes a Sprite, otherwise it will remain a MovieClip. In short, make sure you check the symbols type before calling MovieClip methods on an embedded symbol.

One last strange thing I noticed is that inside of FlexBuilder embedded MovieClips are sealed unlike within the Flash IDE. The only fix I have found for this is to add the embedded clip as a child of a new MovieClip. I think that is kind of ugly, but it works.

- Norm

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 2:45 pm and is filed under ActionScript. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.