AS3: Issue with movieclip within a button

Question

I've been reading that you're not able to have a movieclip nested within a button, but I have this working on a button with a pulsing effect.

The issue I'm having is that it's not working on another button I created. I just wanted to create a blinking effect, but it's not reading it.

I've seen tutorials on how to make a movieclip into a button, but it's not working.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You know what's funny is this exact same thing happened to me. I created a button with a movie clip and it worked fine once, then next time I tried to do it I couldn't get it to work. I think as a general rule of thumb, you shouldn't expect to nest movieclips within buttons. I can't remember what I did the first time, but I think it had to do with extending the movie clip class instead of extending simple button.

The problem of course is if you create a symbol of type button, it won't let you extend movie clip. Anyways, there is something that can easily solve your problem though.

What I do now is whatever movie clip you want, create it separately, use code to position it right on top of the button, then apply the following code.

mouseEnabled = false;
yourMovieclip.mouseEnabled = false;
yourMovieclip.mouseChildren = false;

That way your button will work fine (ie, your movieclip won't block your button's mouse detection). Hope that helps!

Answer 2

Why not just create a MovieClip and give it some event listeners for roll over and roll out that tell it to animate to a certain point on its timeline? You don't need to use the button symbol for buttons. I can't even think of the last time I did.

Answer 3

The SimpleButton type can get finicky. SimpleButtons are very very simple and not as complex as a MovieClip, and when you nest the MC into a Button, results are not always as expected and seemingly random. It'd be much less of a pain to create a MovieClip and give it event listeners on the first frame, for example:

stop();
this.addEventListener(MouseEvent.ROLL_OVER, hoverState);
this.addEventListener(MouseEvent.ROLL_OUT, normalState);

function hoverState(event:MouseEvent):void
{
   gotoAndStop(2);
}
function normalState(event:MouseEvent):void
{
   gotoAndStop(1);
}

Then just have whatever MovieClips you want on frames 1 and 2 to be your normal and hover states, respectively. This way, you just have MovieClips nested in MovieClips instead of nested in SimpleButtons.