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What is the best way to handle MouseEvents?
Should I add an event on each MovieClip I want to work with, or a general Event at a holder MovieClip (or even at the stage) with internal control from the function?
I generaly see people here at work using one Event for each MovieClip, but all linked to the same funcion that handles them in general, is that a good thing? "target" and "currentTarget" seem a bit weird to me at first, but I think I'm starting to get it.
I recommend adding events to the MovieClips of interest and not a general handler on the stage that you then sort into different objects. The massive switch statement or whatever that you'd be writing would be annoying to maintain and not really gain you anything.
Indeed, I sometimes put in extra invisible Sprites solely for the purpose of managing which objects have event listeners applied. The reason is because sometimes mouse handlers get confused and behave oddly when you apply a mouse event listener to the child of another object with a mouse event listener; it's cleaner to deal with when all objects with event listeners are on completely separate branches of the display hierarchy.
For example, if I have a button attached to a MovieClip and I want both the button and MovieClip to receive separate mouse events, what I'll do is make an extra sprite and attack both the button and the MovieClip to that.
I want to add the caveat here that it's more efficient for processing if there is only one listener for each event on an object. This is kinda premature optimizations so I wouldn't stress over it too much, but if you have multiple functions that you want to happen in response to an event then it's better to have a single event listener that calls the multiple functions.
This is a slightly different situation than what you asked (a single listener on each of multiple objects vs. multiple listeners on one object) but it's related.
There's an official document from Adobe Optimizing Performance for the Flash Platform - Help - Adobe that says on page 37 that you should call addEventListener() only once:
The code is simplified and much more optimized, with only one call to the addEventListener() method on the parent container. Listeners are no longer registered to the Apple instances, so there is no need to remove them when an apple is clicked
See pages 36 and 37 for a very good example.
