Text Field without MouseEnabled

Need help on this, may be many of you already came across this:

Need to set mouseEnabled property of text field to false so that it doesn’t block mouse events of the display objects directly below it.

But if the text field contains hyperlinks, the links also gets disabled. Is there any way so that the hyper links of text field working and still non hyper linked areas doesn’t blocking the mouse events of below objects.

Why do you set mouseEnabled property of text field to false ?

If it’s you want to disabled mouse wheel , there is another property – mouseWheelEnabled

FlashTang said
Why do you set mouseEnabled property of text field to false ?
If it’s you want to disabled mouse wheel , there is another property – mouseWheelEnabled

Mouse wheel is not the problem. Actually the text field stops triggering mouse events (Up, Down etc ) of objects behind it. It needs to allow triggering those object’s mouse events.

In AS2 , this was not a problem. Trying to achieve same with AS3 but seems never possible. I ended up enabling mouse only if text field has "<a" tag. Not a complete solution but reduces the difficulties.

Looks like more options they add, less intelligence the player becomes!

I remember encountering this problem too and looking for a solution… I think I never found one.

One extreme solution would be to set textfield mouse-disabled, ‘extract’ the bounding box of the text(s) containing the link (optionally in some off-stage texfield clone) and generating a 0% alpha rectangle with the link-click function on top of it

patrickjansen said
I remember encountering this problem too and looking for a solution… I think I never found one.

Yes, looks like no straightforward ways. We don’t have following 2 things which causes this simple task impossible.

1. Two overlapped siblings simultaneously can’t sense same mouse event
2. For Text Field, the mouseEnabled property always applies to the text field’s bounding box as well as text content. No separate properties or no mouseChildren property for Text field.

Another thing that doesn’t related to this issue is logically the mouseEnabled property should be ‘false’ by default. Couldn’t understand why it should be enabled even without having events added. I doubt they will ever change these things even after 5-6 years from now. Well known pains!

patrickjansen said
One extreme solution would be to set textfield mouse-disabled, ‘extract’ the bounding box of the text(s) containing the link (optionally in some off-stage texfield clone) and generating a 0% alpha rectangle with the link-click function on top of it

That is a possibility, I thought the same but afraid to sacrifice the link and hover styles!

VF said

patrickjansen said
I remember encountering this problem too and looking for a solution… I think I never found one.

Yes, looks like no straightforward ways. We don’t have following 2 things which causes this simple task impossible.

1. Two overlapped siblings simultaneously can’t sense same mouse event
2. For Text Field, the mouseEnabled property always applies to the text field’s bounding box as well as text content. No separate properties or no mouseChildren property for Text field.

Another thing that doesn’t related to this issue is logically the mouseEnabled property should be ‘false’ by default. Couldn’t understand why it should be enabled even without having events added. I doubt they will ever change these things even after 5-6 years from now. Well known pains!

patrickjansen said
One extreme solution would be to set textfield mouse-disabled, ‘extract’ the bounding box of the text(s) containing the link (optionally in some off-stage texfield clone) and generating a 0% alpha rectangle with the link-click function on top of it

That is a possibility, I thought the same but afraid to sacrifice the link and hover styles!

1: Well, they can sense the same mouse event, obviously you have to register the same listener to both the objects.

2: The mouseChildren refers only to the object’s children, textfields can’t have children. A child is an object contained by another one (eg a movieclip contained by another movieclip).

The extreme solution seems more complicated than simply add to the textfields the same mouse events of the object below them…

I think you can simply solve this by adding the same over and out event listeners of your clip to your textfield.

^ haha it is true as long as we imagine things as example scenario. When implementing to the projects, the amount of hierarchical cross connection makes things too complicated due to lack of 1 or 2 properties. For example, if the siblings are different swf files, we are lost! I am facing this on one of my old item right now. I think that’s why most of the AS3 files are good at performance but pain on ease / consistency of interaction. We can’t always blame the developers – we have time constraints!

Regarding the text field – mouseChildren, I thought there is no problem for them to give access to it’s 2 known children, ie the bounding box and text itself. That one thing will just reproduce same easiness we see in AS2

VF said
^ haha it is true as long as we imagine things as example scenario. When implementing to the projects, the amount of hierarchical cross connection makes things too complicated due to lack of 1 or 2 properties. For example, if the siblings are different swf files, we are lost! I am facing this on one of my old item right now. I think that’s why most of the AS3 files are good at performance but pain on ease / consistency of interaction. We can’t always blame the developers – we have time constraints! Regarding the text field – mouseChildren, I thought there is no problem for them to give access to it’s 2 known children, ie the bounding box and text itself. That one thing will just reproduce same easiness we see in AS2

One of the main reasons I never released a new as3 file is just for the over complication needed to make the more basic things… but who cares now

mouseEnabled , this is what I’m looking for ,it very useful property , never use it before lol

FlashTang said
mouseEnabled , this is what I’m looking for ,it very useful property , never use it before lol

Did you made those flip books without using mouseEnabled? it is an achievement!