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.

Referring to Instances and Main Movies

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clipA because both have the main timeline as their _parent. In this case, you can refer

to

clipD from a script attached to clipB as follows:

_parent._parent.clipD // This refers to clipD, a child of the main

// timeline (clipA's _parent) and therefore

// a sibling of clipA

Note that the main timeline does not have a _parent property (main movies are the

top of any clip hierarchy and cannot be contained by another timeline); references to

_root._parent yield undefined.

Referring to Main Movies with _root and _leveln

Now that we’ve seen how to navigate up and down the clip hierarchy relative to the

current clip, let’s explore other ways to navigate along absolute pathways and even

among other documents stored in other levels of the Player’s document stack. In ear-

lier chapters, we saw how these techniques applied to variables and functions; here

we’ll see how they can be used to control movie clips.

Referencing the current level’s main movie using _root

When an instance is deeply nested in a clip hierarchy, we can repeatedly use the

_parent property to ascend the hierarchy until we reach the main movie timeline. But

in order to ease the labor of referring to the main timeline from deeply nested clips,

we can also use the built-in global property ...