Event Listeners

Event listeners are an important part of Flash. What they allow you to do is to “listen” for an event that occurs on a specific object. For example, one event that often occurs in Flash is a button getting clicked. When a button is clicked the button object dispatches an event telling flash that is was clicked. Often times we want to respond to a click and function. Say we have a window that pops up and on the window there is a cancel button. We want the window to close when the cancel button is clicked. Here is the code:

cancelButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, handleClick);
function handleClick(event:MouseEvent):void
{
//Write the code here that closes the window
}

In this example I have added a button to the window and given it the instance name cancelButton. This allows me to listen to that button and respond to the events.