ActionScript 3 dynamically call buttons

Question

Hi,

I've tried to access buttons in my menu. I only want to add listeners to the items that is in the XML file im loading.

The thing is, i dont know how to call a button i've named "Var1_btn" when i've got a string "Var1".

Does anyone know how to call buttons from a for-loop?

for each(var chapter in presentation_xml.*)
{
    chapter + "_btn".addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, traceit);
}

is what i came up with...

Answer 1

DisplayObjectContainer::getChildByName()

Answer 2

Assuming you load the xml into a variable called presentationXML, it's like this:

for each(var chapter in presentationXML.*)
{
    this[chapter + "_btn"].addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, traceit);
}

Answer 3

You can use:

for each(var chapter in presentation_xml.*)
{
    this[chapter + "_btn"].addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, traceit);
}

but you could also use getChildByName, like this:

for each(var chapter in presentation_xml.*)
{
    var myBtn:MovieClip = getChildByName(chapter + "_btn");
    myBtn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, traceit);
}

Here is a good post on when to use getChildByName.

Answer 4

Better use chapter.toString().

The same effect, but other coder will read it ad understand, that chapter is being converted from XML to its string representation when concatenates with string literal.