Can i assign a child state to a movie clip that is already placed on stage

Question

Hello
Is it possible to add a child state to a movie clip that is
already placed on stage,
i need to do this so i can move the movieclip to the top of
the display list.
thanks for the help
mt

Answer 1

"The objects i want it to appear above are loaded swf's onto
the same main stage."
Aha, this is where things can get confusing. The terminology
between the Flash Authoring tool and ActionScript is not
consistent.
In ActionScript, the Stage is the top most DisplayObject. You
probably get that.
In Flash, the canvas that is often referred to as "the stage"
is not the Stage object of ActionScript, rather the Flash stage is
a DisplayObject class called MainTimeline (or if you assign a
document class, it's that class), which is the first and only child
of the ActionScript Stage object. It's the only child unless, of
course, you add something else to the ActionScript Stage object at
runtime... like a loaded swf. ;)
So in other words, if you are doing anything like this:
stage.addChild(myLoadedSWF)
You are actually putting myLoadedSWF above the MainTimeline
object, which is the entire Flash timeline. There's nothing wrong
with that, but in this case it means changing the depth of things
inside the MainTimeline is not going to change the fact that the
MainTimeline itself is below myLoadedSWF.
Most likely the simplest solution is to add your loaded SWFs
to the property "root", not stage. root can refer to different
things in different places, but most of the time it refers to the
MainTimeline, and if I had to guess I would say it almost certainly
does in your case. Note that the "root" property is typed as a
DisplayObject, not a DisplayObjectContainer, so addChild (which is
a DisplayObjectContainer method) will not be recognized unless you
typecast to DisplayObjectContainer or a subclass of
DisplayObjectContainer, like Sprite or MovieClip:
MovieClip(root).addChild(myLoadedSWF)
Also note that, unlike AS2, in AS3 it's very easy to simply
add your loaded SWF below existing objects you create in Flash. You
can use addChildAt(obj,0) for instance to add it to the very
bottom.