Flash 8 hitArea quirks

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Also known as:

  • dynamically drawn hitarea bug
  • filter applied hitarea bug
  • hitarea no longer works
  • hitarea stops working

I recently noticed two weird bugs while handling hitArea’s in Flash (I say bug you might say feature).

Situation 1:

  • you have a clip on the timeline, let’s call it dialog
  • you have a large hitarea below the dialog, let’s call it largeHitArea
  • you have connected the hitarea to the dialog: dialog.hitArea = largeHitArea
  • you have set the onPress of the dialog to anything but null

Everything works fine up to this point, the large hitarea makes the dialog act as a modal dialog, since you cannot trigger any mouse events below it.

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Consuming webservices in Flash 8

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During a partial refactoring process of the Behrloo client system, one of the items on my list was the backend webservice result processing. Without going into a lot of detail how these services are wrapped, it suffices to say that somewhere in the application a couple of webservices are being initialized and utilized through the macromedia webservice classes.

You might be familiar with them, they come in several flavours, for example the WebServiceConnector and the Webservice class. Personally I don’t like to use the WebServiceConnector, mostly since the Webservice class is simple enough to use and tends to give you more control over what is happening.

Basic example

As a simple example of using this Webservice class, paste the following code onto the first frame of the timeline in a new fla document (on a sidenote, REAL applications are not written on a timeline, but for example purposes/quick proof of concepts, this will do just fine):

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