How to use common event handler for selected movie clips?

Question

I have a 50-state map in a flash movie. Each state is a movie
clip.
Goal: when mouse moves over a state or is clicked in a state,
the state will be highlighted in a bright color and a small box
will pop up near the state and display some information about the
state.
Question: I know I can add mouse event handler for each state
movie clip. But this is simply not good since this has to be done
50 times and codes thus scattered different places. Ideally, I only
want to have one script that determines where the mouse position is
when events trigged and then do right things (highlight the state
and display info. in a pop-up). How can this be implemented?
Thanks!

Answer 1

There are a number of ways. Which way is best depends on how
you have things set up so far.
E.g. If they have an enumerable naming convention:
e.g. each clip is like state_0 , state_1 etc.
Then you can loop through them and assign them all to the
same mouse event handler via the loop. You would need properties
other than the name of the clip to identify the state. E.g. each
clip could contain its own data or the index could be a pointer to
the state data (objects with state name and info properties) in a
separate array.
//state clips named
for (var i=0;i<50;i++) {
this["state_"+i].stateindex=i;
this["state_"+i].onPress= statePressHandler;
var stateData:Array = [{name:"StateName,info:"this state
Info"}, name:"StateName,info:"this state Info"}, etc...]
function statePressHandler() {
trace(this);
trace(stateData[this.stateindex].name+"="+stateData[this.stateindex].info);
Other ways are possible too but the best approach depends on
how you have named the clips and whether you're creating them with
code or whether they're already on stage from authoring (my guess).
If they're already on stage and they're called "Alaska" etc, then I
would be inclined to put them all inside a container clip that
contains nothing else other than states. It would avoid the need
for an array of clip names or for checking some other specific
property of each clip to determine if its a 'state' clip and not
something else in a for..in loop.