as3 referencing members of an array not explicitly defined

Question

I am creating a bunch of objects in an array. I'm used to doing this iteratively, like

for(i:int; i < number; i++){
  ball= new Ball;
  balls.push(ball);
  }

and then later I can make reference to balls[i]. Now however I'm creating the objects with mouse click, not with a for loop, so I don't have that [i], so my other code makes reference to just "ball", which means it affects only whichever one was just created. Is there any reasonable way to 'name' each object arbitrarily so I can later say "each of you go off and do your own thing, and ignore everyone else"?

Answer 1

There is a couple of solutions,

If you have a reference to the ball, you can use

myArray.indexOf(myBall)

Which will give you its position in the array, so you can talk to it.

you can also store them with a name value like this:

myArray["name" + uniqueIdentifier] = myBall;

That would replace your push statements.

Alternatively you could just loop over them all like this:

for(var i:int = 0; i < myArray.length; i++)
{
    ball = myArray[i];
    //perhaps you stored a value on ball to distinguish when it was created
    if(ball.wasCreatedByMouseClick) // do something
}

Hope that gives you some ideas.

Answer 2

i don't know what your code is doing but according to what you described i'd use a dictionary to store your objects with a string key.

dictionary class behaves as an object in which you can set a dynamic property (key) and its value (your object). it's different from a object because keys could be anything (strings, objects, arrays,...anything).

this is an example:

var d:Dictionary = new Dictionary (true); d["myBall"] = new Ball();

function getBallByKey(key:String):Ball { return d[key]; }

depending on the scenario a good thing is to set dictionary references to weak. this is to avoid memory leaks (actually letting the object "die" as no other reference but the dictionary itself is pointing at that object)

Piergiorgio Niero