AS3 MouseEvent and weakReference

Question

Ok, here's a weird thing:

I have a class, which is a MovieClip that has 2 children, MovieClips also.
I add the children to him and base MovieClip to stage.One of the children is animated.
All is perfect.
Now when I add MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP on the children, all works fine.
Yet if I set useWeakReference to true (the 5th parameter) mouse event does not fire anymore,but the items are on stage. Basically, somehow, they are not in the memory.


Of course if I add a simple onEnterFrame that does nothing to base MovieClip, it traces the MovieClip, yet the MouseEvents does not trigger. That means the object is still there, but somehow for flash is not

Now, this is a simplified concept, that is easy to clean, but my code is very big and a simple removeEventListener is not a solution. At least not a simple one.
What are your suggestions to work around this?

Answer 1

I'm not sure how complex your code is, but if each movieclip has MOUSE_UP event handler - some function, you could indeed use removeEventListener MOUSE_UP function. For instance:

var mc:MovieClip = new MovieClip();
mc.addEventListener( MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, onMU );
function onMU(e:MouseEvent){
   var target = MovieClip(e.currentTarget);
   target.removeEventListener( MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, onMU );
}

This way you can have multiple movieclips and remove listeners without knowing object name.

Alternatively you could modify your code to add aray of all added events and then listen to REMOVE_FROM_STAGE event. Something like this:

var mc:MovieClip = new MovieClip();
mc.events = [];
mc.events.push( { evt: MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, fn: onMU } );
mc.addEventListener( MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, onMU } )
//or use events array reference to keep events and functions in one place. 
//when object is removed you can iterate through events array and automatically remove 
//all listeners

Another alternative would be to create Class that extends MovieClip - but since your code is huge you probably don't want to do that.

You can also look on Robert Penner's Signals library, which is interesting alternative to AS3 events. (https://github.com/robertpenner/as3-signals)