I ended up using a different approach to my panel, so I didn’t investigate the problem I was having in my previous post. I’m not running into the issue now, so perhaps it was just something weird with my code.
Here’s what my panel looks like at the moment. The interface is very rough and I’m sure it would make no sense to anyone but myself. It’s a bit of a pain to use, too.
My panel does not monitor the current selection. I tried the test that I linked to in my previous post, and in Flash 8 (at least for me) it causes the IDE to go all wonky: the mouse pointer flickers and changes, and double-clicking on things on the stage doesn’t always work. The symptoms continue even after closing the panel, sometimes! How strange.
Instead, the user has to select the element and then click on the “Get” button. This loads the selection’s information into the panel. “Set” puts the information back into the currently selected element. It’s all rather awkward.
The following two buttons require some explanation. “Memorize Children Pos” takes a snapshot of the positions and orientations of all of the selected element’s “children.” The element’s children are listed in the text area above. Clicking on “Make Children Follow” repositions all of the children of the selected element so that they maintain the same relative positions and orientations as they did when “Memorize” was clicked. Yes, hierarchies of any arbitrary depth are supported, so the children of children (etc) are also moved accordingly.
I am going to continue to use this panel, and perhaps release it, and the source code, at some point. It’s all pretty rough, though, so I am a little hesitant to do so.