How to dinamically name objects in a for statement using addChild

Question

Hi.
I was wondering where did go the for statement with
attachMovie from library in AS 3.
I mean i was having in AS 2:
for (i=0; i<5; i++) {
attachMovie("sim", "sim"+i, i);
Now in AS 3:
for (var i=0; i<5; i++) {
addChild(new sim());
I can't figure out how to name every instance of the "sim"
object from library that i add to the stage without using string.
How do I dinamically name the added instances of the object
from the library for future reference and usage throughout the
code?
Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Well except those items aren't named! :)
The sim class (BTW it is generally better practice to have
class names start capitalized so that they can be distinguished
from instances which should be lower case.) would need to have a
name property if you wan't to name the instances.
This code create a variable which refers to each Sim instance
and those variables have a "name" of sim0, sim1, etc. And I think
this would be close to replicating the AS2 behavior. But AS3 is a
shift in thinking about your content as well and I don't think this
is probably the best approach.
The bad thing here is that the references aren't typed. Which
disables a lot of the good things that the compiler can do for you.
The following code would do the same thing as clbeech's and give
each instance a name (assuming the class definition includes a name
property.)
var i:int;
for(i=0;i=5;i++){
var curSim:Sim=new Sim();
curSim.name="sim"+i;
addChild(curSim);
Then the trick which is new in AS3 is to use the
DisplayObjectContainer.getChildByName() method when you want to the
retrieve an instance by its name. The help files do caution that
this is slower than something like getChildAt() which retrieves the
values from an array.
So perhaps that points the way toward a better way of
managing these types of things. Perhaps you should create an array
and push a reference to each of your Sim instances onto that array.
But it all really depends upon what you are trying to accomplish.