In Actionscript 3.0, if an event is dispatched by the member of an object, how can I access the object containing that member?

Question

I'm trying to set up a menu. Because this menu can have a varying number of entries, I'm generating it instead of hard-coding it. The Menu object contains an Array of MenuEntry objects, and each MenuEntry has a framework.Button object which contains the text and box that actually gets drawn to the screen. I can add a MouseEvent.Click event to the Button, but not the MenuEntry. If I do it that way, though, I'm unable to access the data in the MenuEntry object that contains the button, so I don't know which MenuEntry was clicked.

The only solution I can think of involves checking the mouse position against the position of each MenuEntry, depending on the number of Menu Entries. This does not seem like the right way to do it, though, as it is not scalable. I tried having the MenuEntry class extend the Button class, so theoretically, the MenuEntry itself could dispatch mouse click events, but that didn't work.

Answer 1

In case MenuEntry objects are not display objects, you can iterate through the array of MenuEntry and compare if the button is same as e.currentTarget to find the MenuEntry that was clicked.

button.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, clickHandler);
function clickHandler(e:MouseEvent):void
{
  var t:DisplayObject = DisplayObject(e.currentTarget);
  var menuEntry:MenuEntry;
  for(var i:Number = 0; i < menuEntries.length; i++)
  {
    if(menuEntries[i].button == t)
    {
      menuEntry = t;
      break;
    }
  }
  trace(menuEntry);
}

---

If MenuEntry items are indeed display objects, you can get a reference to them from the button's parent property

box.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, clickHandler);
function clickHandler(e:MouseEvent):void
{
  var t:DisplayObject = DisplayObject(e.currentTarget);
  trace(t);//traces box
  trace(t.parent);/* traces box's parent which can be 
                     the same as root if box is added
                     as child to the root */
  trace(t.root);//traces the root 
  traceParents(t);
}

---

traceParents(t:DisplayObject):void
{
  var p:DisplayObjectContainer = t.parent;
  while(p != null)
  {
    trace(p);
    p = p.parent;
  }
}