Instance Arrays in Flash

One thing that I thought wasn’t planned very well in Flash 9 and AS3 is having a bunch of instances on your stage, and then having to declare each one in your ActionScript files. Up until now, I have been naming all my objects something like “obj0”, “obj1”, “obj2”, etc and then in my constructor, adding each of those objects manually to an array one at a time. The problem with this, obviously, as it doesn’t cater well to expansion or large numbers of objects. If I added more objects to the stage, I’d have to update the code.

Here’s code I came up with today:

public class RollingNumberDisplay extends MovieClip {

    protected var digits:Array;

    /**
      * Constructor
     */
    public function RollingNumberDisplay() {
        super();
        var counter:uint;

        digits = new Array();

        counter = 0;
        while(this.hasOwnProperty("digit" + counter)) {
            digits.push(this["digit" + counter]);
            counter++;
        }

        trace("length=" + digits.length);
    }

}