How to access child movieclip info of an object in an array?

Question

Hi
I've dynamically created a whole bunch of movieclips.
I've given each clip a name based on a variable number:
     mc.name = "mc"+i;
I've also use addChild to add a couple of dynamic text fields to each movieClip, named myText1 and myText2.
I then push each movieClip object into an array:
     myArray.push(mc);
When I addChild the movieClips, they display fine, complete with each textField.  And if I use the following loop to trace the name of each clip in the array, I get:
     for(var i=0; i<myArray.length; i++)
               trace(myArray[i].name);
output:
     mc1
     mc2
     mc3
     mc4
etc
What I want to now is be able to access the text fields within each movieclip in the array.  However, I am getting errors when I try different ways.  For example:
     for(var i=0; i<myArray.length; i++)
               trace(myArray[i].myText1.text);
gives the error: A term is undefined and has no properties.
How do you access the values and contents of the children of movieClip objects that are stored in arrays?
Thanks
Shaun

Answer 1

For whatever reason, dynamically added children cannot be targeted that way.  If you added the textfields dynamically you may need to use getChildByName() to target them.  It partly depends on how you created them and whether or not you have direct access to them.  Aside from that you could also assign the textfields to variables that you create for the mc and target those by their variable names.
The following demos these two approaches:
var mc:MovieClip = new MovieClip();
addChild(mc);
var tf:TextField = new TextField();
tf.text = "this is text";
mc.addChild(tf);
// first way
tf.name = "tfield";
trace(TextField(mc.getChildByName("tfield")).text);
// second way
mc.tfid = tf;
trace(mc.tfid.text);
You could also store the textfields in arrays as they are created and have direct access to them with out the need to target the mc... the index should be the same as that which you use for the mc anyways.