"Anchor" for objects?

Question

Hi,
is there a way to have (the postion of) objects be dependant of another one? To illustrate my question, I have attached a simple .fla file with two boxes (MovieClips) that grow in height. Since the position of the bottom box is constant, the top box soon expands "into" the one below so that parts of it are hidden. What I want is that the gap between those two objects stays constant (in this case 50px).
So, is there any way to make the position of one object dependant on (the size of) another? Or is there any other "workaround"/tip you can give me? Please keep in mind that I am very new to Flash/AS3!
Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

kglad wrote:
if you want to pursue the "mess" then you are taking the path of maximum difficulty for yourself.
you'll need to start a loop (like onEnterFrame) everytime a box changes size and you should stop that loop when your box stops changing size.  in that loop you'll need to reference all instances that need to respond to the box changing size and you'll need a reference to the box that's changing size.  then you'll need to code for the changes you want.
just start with the easiest part of that.  create an instance name for the box that's changing shape.  to do that you'll need to convert the box to a movieclip.  see if you can do that while maintaining your timeline tween.
1) So you think my idea of adding up the heights is not viable? Wouldn't I "just" have to be able to ask for each object and then position the objects accordingly? Or is that what you want your loop to do? BTW, so far the only thing I have coded is "stop();". While I am experienced in C++ (and HTML, some JavaScript and PHP), I have no idea how a loop over several frames would work. But I admit I have not really looked into AS3 yet.
2) I have done what you said (basically the example I attached in the first post was already like that). However, I don't know what you mean by
see if you can do that while maintaining your timeline tween.
Again, thank you so much for your time!