Recently, while programming a little RSS feed Flashlet, I came across a bug in Flash involving the MovieClip.createTextField() method. A bug that felt strangely familiar.

I originally ran into this bug while programming the McDougal-Littell “Take-Home Tutor” a couple of years back (in my previous life) and had pretty much forgotten all about it…until now (glad to know the old noodle’s still working).

I’m loading the RSS feed from a blog and dynamically creating textfields using the MovieClip.createTextField(…) method to house the content from the feed within container movieclips. When I would try to lay these clips out they would end up overlapping a few ten or twenty pixels or so. On a whim I tried calling “._height” on the container clip I was using for layout just before placing the next clip and low and behold that seemed to do the trick.

The code looks something like this:

I’m assuming the call to prevClip._height forces the movieclip to recalculate its height before continuing on with the layout.

Hooray for trying random stuff!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 18th, 2005 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.