Their flash.display.SimpleButton is the culprit once again.
I was dynamically generating SimpleButton instances in ActionScript 3, and adding MOUSE_OVER and MOUSE_OUT event handlers.
But the event handlers were never firing.
I reviewed the documentation - the SimpleButton definitely supports the MOUSE_OVER and MOUSE_OUT events.
I tried adding the event handlers to the flash.text.TextField instances which formed the button states, but that didn't work either - the events simply never ever fired.
I finally figured out what's going wrong. It's that SimpleButton constructor once again.
Here's what the doco says (false info - worse than useless) about the SimpleButton constructor :
Any or all of the display objects that represent the various button states can be set as parameters in the constructor.
ANY OR ALL ... CAN BE. In other words, it is OPTIONAL to set the various states using the constructor.
In a previous blog post, I noted that, despite the CLAIM that the constructor arguments are optional, the first argument is actually MANDATORY.
If you don't specify the first argument, the button never transitions between states, even if you set the states later using the upState, overState etc properties.
But if you DO specify the first argument, the up-and-over animation works correctly.
That was from that previous blog post.
Well, the new lesson for today's blog post is that in fact ALL FOUR arguments to the constructor are MANDATORY if you wish to get MOUSE_OVER and MOUSE_OUT events from the SimpleButton.
It doesn't make sense, and it makes mockery of their (poor as too often the case) documentation, and in fact makes mockery of Adobe's ability to design an intuitive API, but it is the case.
The one saving grace is that we can specify the SAME DisplayObject for all four constructor arguments. e.g.
var sb:SimpleButton = new SimpleButton(MySprite, MySprite, MySprite, MySprite);
(And of course, the other way you can do it is subclass SimpleButton and set the upState, overState etc properties in your own constructor. Basically, by the end of the constructor, those values must be set.)
As a final note, I was just about to paste the simple test code I whipped up, to make it extremely easy for you to reproduce my test results, but as I did so, Adobe Flash suddenly died on me and completely disappeared from the taskbar without even its usual "Adobe Flash just died" popup message.
All I can say is that I am disgusted with Adobe Flash - not only is the documentation often worse than useless, but the program itself is fragile, and crashes on me usually more than once per work day.
And this is Flash CS4 - their latest and greatest...
