ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Chapter 13: Movie Clips

The Programmatically Generated Content Stack

Programmatically generated instances are normally stacked separately from the man-

ually created instances held in the internal layer stack. Each movie clip has its own

programmatically generated content stack that holds:

• Movie clip instances created via duplicateMovieClip(), attachMovie(), and

createEmptyMovieClip()

• Text field instances created via createTextField()

The stacking order for movie clips in the programmatically generated content stack

varies, depending on how they were created.

How clips generated via attachMovie() and createEmptyMovieClip()

are added to the stack

A new instance generated via attachMovie() or createEmptyMovieClip() is always

stacked above (i.e., in the foreground relative to) the clip to which it was attached.

For example, suppose that we have two clips—

X and Y—in the internal layer stack of

a movie and that

X resides on a layer above Y. Now further suppose we attach a new

clip,

A, to X and a new clip, B, to Y:

x.attachMovie("A", "A", 0);

y.attachMovie("B", "B", 0);

In our scenario, the clips appear from top to bottom in this order: A, X, B, Y, as shown

in Figure 13-1.

Once a clip is generated, it too provides a separate space above its internal layer stack

for more programmatically