Field Text Property Not Found

Question

I have a Director MX 2004 based training course that is
periodically getting the following error:
property not found: #text
This training program was developed in Director 6.5 and
updated last year to MX 2004. The training program had been running
without error for six years prior to the update. I didn't update
the script that is causing the error until after receiving the
error reports.
After getting the error report I was able to reproduce the
error while running in MX 2004 and the error said:
Script error: Property not found
set the text of member "IN" = tempIN & sp &
pretempIN
#text
I checked the debugger and the local variables were all valid
and nothing seem out of place. The field cast member "IN" exists
and the member's sprite is static in the score (i.e., it's not
being dynamically created).
Since I couldn't figure out what the problem was I updated
the field update scripts to the new syntax:
member("INText", "Internal").text = tempIN & sp &
pretempIN
I also changed the name of the cast member thinking that the
name "IN" may be causing the problem. There are no other cast
members of the same name. Unfortunately, I'm still getting the same
error. There are other field member sprites that are getting
updated successfully before this line of code but for some reason
this particular field member sprite is causing the error, even
after changing the name of the member. I've since moved my text
formatting script to the frame script in the score where the field
members are located and tried preloading the member but neither of
those changes helped.
This error is very sporadic and I've only been able to
reproduce it few times on my local machine, and not since I updated
the script syntax and the field name, but my client is still
encountering the error. I checked that my client's program file
installation is up-to-date and they're running the newest
executable.
Any ideas of what might be causing the problem? I'm
stumped...
Mark

Answer 1

quote:
You seem to be using #field member and #text member
interchangably. They're
not the same type of member and they have different
properties.
Actually, I'm not. It's a field member. The member's name
"INText" probably led you to believe it's a text member. I changed
the member's name from "IN" to "INText" as I thought perhaps the
"IN" may be causing the problem. The member has always been a field
member. I'm not formatting the field or anything like that, I'm
only replacing the field contents. I don't use Director much
anymore, other than this project, but having used both 7.5 and MX,
I assumed that I could access the text property of a field using
the member("myField", "castName").text syntax as per the docs.
As for the concatenation, the variables are all strings so it
shouldn't really matter. The real problem is that the field
member's text property can't be found, not what I'm putting into
it. And the fact that it only happens occasionally is what I can't
figure out. Since I encountered the error myself inside of Director
and was able to run the debugger I was able to see all of the
variables in the debugger and check for the field member and its
properties in the Message window and everything looked okay.
quote:
To double check the member coflickt issue (director always
operates on the first occurance of a member name
It's definitely the only member using the name "INText",
plus, I checked all cast libs and it's a unique name.
When I originally converted the movie I do recall that I had
another cast member named "IN", the original name of the field
member, when I converted the movie. I can't remember the type of
member it was but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a field. Perhaps the
movie still has some kind of reference to that not field member and
may point to it occasionally, even though I've since renamed the
original field cast member to "INText".
Mark