Acquiring movieclip instance names

Question

I need to write a function that retrieves the instance names of movie clips without knowing what those instance names are.
Here's the scenario:
The timeline reaches a frame which has a movieclip with an instance name of "bigClip"
bigClip itself holds a number of movieclips, each with its own unique instance name. On the enterFrame of bigClip, I want to retrieve all the instance names that are on bigClip and put them in an array.
I can't seem to figure this out. Any guidance would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
David

Answer 1

Well I doubt you want to do it on the enterframe of bigClip. Do you really need to find the names of all the clips 30 times a second every second that big clip exists? I'm guessing/hoping you just mean when bigClip starts.
In any event you can make a function that returns an array. Perhaps something like this:
function findChildrenClips(clip:MovieClip):Array{
var theClips:Array=new Array();
for(var a in clip){
if(typeof(clip[a])=="movieclip"){
theClips.push(clip[a]);
return theClips;
Then on the frame where big clip exisits you can do this:
var foundClips:Array=findChildrenClips(bigClip);
Now if you really want to do this onEnterFrame you could probably do it, but there is probably a better way to structure your file in that case.