Selecting objects by their stage location

Question

I'm trying to create an application that will allow searching of a database and create resulting movie clips on the stage. Is there a way to select all the movie clips that fall within a certain region of the stage?
Thanks,
Dave

Answer 1

I guess a lot depends on each use case but in principal you can loop through stage children and put the once that fall into certain area into an array. Something like this:
var collection:Array = [];
var currentChild:DisplayObject;
var chldrentNumber:int = stage.numChildren;
// child boundaries
var childBounds:Rectangle;
// stage area boundaries
var boundaries:Rectangle = new Rectangle (50, 50 , 400, 400);
for(var i:int = 0; i < chldrentNumber; i++) {
     currentChild = stage.getChildAt(i);
     childBounds = currentChild.getBounds(stage);
     if (childBounds.x >= boundaries.x &&
          childBounds.y <= boundaries.y &&
          childBounds.y + childBounds.height <= boundaries.height &&
          childBounds.x + childBounds.width <= boundaries.width) {
          collection.push(currentChild);