When handling a flash.events.MouseEvent, how do I find the localX/Y with respect to the currentTarget?

Question

I have a component which draws a grid of things and I want a small highlight square to follow the mouse around highlighting the square that the mouse is currently over.

The whole grid is basically just one big sprite (it's a very large grid and this was faster than using pre-existing components) and the highlight square is another sprite which I'm trying to move around according to the mouse position.

So, what I have is a MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE handler attached to the grid sprite and this tries to determine where the mouse is and what square it's over so that it can move the highlight square to the right place. I was using localX/localY for this, but as soon as I move the highlight sprite under the mouse, these become local to the highlight and not the grid!

I was toying with stageX/Y as well, but these seemed to become pretty useless when the stage is scrolled or your component is hiding in nested display containers.

Answer 1

Basically, i think, you want to check the the grid components mouseX and mouseY property which will give you the mouse coordinates relative to that component. Then a little bit of maths should be able to give you what grid element you are over.

Answer 2

Assuming your highlight sprite is a sibling to the grid and they are both children of the main application, and you've drawn child sprites (squares) within the grid: You could add event listeners to each of the grid's square sprites. On rollover, highlight the square. Then you probably won't need to perform any translation of grid or mouse coordinates using grid.localToGlobal(new Point(targetSquare.x, targetSquare.y)) or highlightSquare.globalToLocal(grid_point).