[RESOLVED] Hi, newbie question about concat

[JediMind]

Hello.

I was a great flash programmer in Flash 4.0 But things have changed and I'm not back to the newbie category.


So I'm wondering if I can concatinate variable names so I can make a loop creating several variables for example.

So here's how I make a new instance of a movieclip by linkage.
var ball1:MovieClip = new Ball();
addChild(ball1);
ball1.x = 300;
ball1.y = 250;

Can I somehow do like this:

var i:int=1;
var ["ball"i]:MovieClip = new Ball();
addChild(["ball"+i]);
["ball"+i].x = 300;
["ball"+i].y = 250;

Where I can put that in a loop and make 10 clips at once, same code just increase the variable i.
Obiously the syntax is wrong but is there a way?

[jAQUAN]

Yes, but don't.
What you'd be doing is dynamically adding properties to an object or a dynamic subclass of object. Not all classes are dynamic so this is not a reliable habit. For instance, MovieClip is dynamic, Sprite is not.

You'd have to evaluate the names to loop over them later which is expensive.

Instead, push them to an array and loop over that.

var myArray:Array = new Array();
for(var i:int = 0; i < 10; i++){
  var ball:Ball = new Ball();
  ball.x = 10 * i;
  ball.y = 5 * i;
  myArray.push(ball);
}

then later you can loop over the balls like this

for(var i:int = 0; i < myArray.length; i++){
  var ball:Ball = myArray[i];
  // do something with ball
}

[JediMind]

thx. Understand completely