Referring to functions on the stage from a movieclip.

Question

First of all, I'd like to thank you to anyone who takes their time to read this. I registered to this forum for the sole purpose of getting help to this one issue of mine, as I found most issues were solved in here. By reading my problem (and hopefully responding) you're doing me a huge favour. Thanks in advance.
I just started "coding" in AS3. By "coding", I actually mean trying around with features and generally trying to grasp the vast amount stuff you can do with this software of. I have some coding experience, however the way   Flash likes to hide code snippets all over my project does tend to confuse me. Not knowing where I tried putting the code and/or rewrote some other stuff keeps me sorta busy.
I'd also like to apologize for the title, if it in any way confuses you. Shortening down my problem to a single sentence was hard, please keep that in mind.
Anyway, my issue is this:
Messing around with movieclips inside movieclips, I've keep encountering the error "1120: Access of undefined property onTimerComplete." I do realize that this error generally is caused by not having defined an instance correctly or not having it defined at all - an error beginners tend to make.
Nonetheless, I'm not trying to refer to an instance/symbol, I am trying to call a function defined on the stage from within a movieclip that also is placed on the stage.
I've been reading huge amounts of text/articles and how-to 's, but they all seem to only touch the subject lightly or simply going in head-first - becoming far too complicated for me (a beginner) to grasp.
So, trying to sum my questions up into something that looks like a tl;dr:
- What's up with levels, "_root" and referring to functions like in the older versions of flash?
Flash tells me to use some display-package instead of _root, when I use that... (I do realize the article is from Flash 5.0)
- How do you refer to a function defined on the stage, from inside a movieclip? (The function is a timer, that is supposed to make the mother-movieclip continue to the next child-movieclip.)
Please, I really don't know how to define my problem any further than this. Ask as many questions as you would like, I really appreciate any help I can get.
- Mattimussi

Answer 1

click file/publish settings/flash and tick "permit debugging".  highlight the line number referenced in the error message.  (and, use:
Calling:
stop();
MovieClip(root).startTimer();
Defining:
var myTimer:Timer = new Timer(2000, 1);
myTimer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE,onTimerComplete);
myTimer.start();
function onTimerComplete(event:TimerEvent):void{
play();
//myTimer.stop();
function startTimer():void{
trace("startTimer function was executed");
myTimer.start();