Copying a Flash MovieClip, or The Flash Holy Grail
Ran into a nice solution for copying arbitrary MovieClips at runtime today. I am designing a spot the difference game akin to 6 Differences with the requirement that, upon finding a difference, the scene should go to the “correct” state depending on which difference was defined as master, among a few other criterion. This required that I somehow duplicate, as much as is possible, the state of the “master” difference, when appropriate.
At any rate, the solution comes from Danny Burbol’s blog, which apparently came from a Experts Exchange thread (damn people charging for information). I modified the solution a bit to fit my needs, but not by a whole lot. Sometimes I only need to copy the instance and I can reconstitute the MovieClip from there but other times I will need to get the whole shebang. It’s pretty handy in general. So my version follows (as a bonus I include my handy-dandy clearAllChildren function):
package com.bmm.utils {
import flash.display.DisplayObject;
import flash.display.DisplayObjectContainer;
import flash.geom.Rectangle;
/**
* ...
* @author BenS
*/
public class UIUtils {
public static function clearAllChildren(c:DisplayObjectContainer):void {
if (c == null || c.numChildren == 0) return;
var i:int = 0, n:int = c.numChildren;
for (i = 0; i < n; i++) {
c.removeChildAt(0);
}
}
public static function simpleDisplayObjectClone(source:DisplayObject):DisplayObject {
var cc:Class = Object(source).constructor;
return new cc();
}
public static function displayObjectClone(source:DisplayObject):DisplayObject {
var copy:DisplayObject = UIUtils.simpleDisplayObjectClone(source);
copy.transform = source.transform;
copy.filters = source.filters;
copy.cacheAsBitmap = source.cacheAsBitmap;
copy.opaqueBackground = source.opaqueBackground;
if (source.scale9Grid) {
var r:Rectangle = source.scale9Grid;
copy.scale9Grid = r;
}
return copy;
}
}
}