Using Class to simplify scripts

Question

Hi,
I have been making a lot of flash projects that require a lot of roll over effects. For example i have 8 images that are black and white and when each is hovered over i would like the colour to return to them. I have being doing this by adding a new event listener for each...
is there a way that i can make all of the images part of the same class so that i only have to write one event listener that will apply the same function to each image on hover?...
Thanks
Fraser

Answer 1

I don't know that classes are the answer to what you seem to want to do, but they certainly couldn't hurt as a way of coding it.  Someone more adept in class matters than I can probably answer to that end.
Each object that you want to interact with needs to have a listener assigned, although there are ways of using the event.target property to have a single listener dealing for multpile objects.  For instance, if you were to plant the image objects inside a movieclip you could assign a listener to the movieclip and the event target property of that in the event handler function can point to one of your image objects.
// mc is a movieclip holding a few differently named instances of movieclips in this example
mc.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, processTarget);
function processTarget(evt:MouseEvent):void {
    trace(evt.target.name);
You wouldn't have to place the objects inside a movieclip, meaning you could just plavce them on the stage and assign the listener to the stage, but in that case anything else on te stage could also register as a target.
If the aspect of having to assign event listeners in multitudes in the real issue for you, you can make the coding of that more efficient by using loops and sequencially naming the objects, such as mc1, mc2, mc3... mc1000
for(var i:uint=1; i<1001; i++){
   this["mc"+String(i)].addEventListener(MouseEvent.ROLL_OVER, doSomething);