Actionscript UIScrollbar and Click Event on containing Element

Question

I'm creating a game in Flash CS5.5, basically a version of "Who wants to be a millionaire?".

I have an answerDisplay Class which contains an answer text. Answer texts can become rather long, and since I have limited screen space I check for very long texts and if a text is too big I add a UIScrollbar besides the text field.

Which works nicely, except for one thing - when the user drags the scroll tab, the text scrolls fine. When the user clicks one of the scrollbar arrows the text field also scrolls fine, as long as the button is clicked, but as soon as the mouse button is released the click event of the containing answerDisplay class is fired, which leads to my program wrongly thinking the user had selected the answer while he just tried to scroll.

I tried catching this via e.target and/or e.currenttarget, but it's no use, I never get a reference to the scrollbar, so I'm never sure if the user clicked one of the arrows or if he genuinely clicked the answer to select it.

How can I make certain that the click event of my answerDisplay Class is not fired when the UIScrollbar is used?

Answer 1

Checking e.target and e.currentTarget is a good start.

You might also want to check the event phase:

For more details on event phase, check grapefrukt's answer

A click from the answerDisplay Class dispatched event should have AT_TARGET phase, while the UIScrollbar event should have the BUBBLING_PHASE. This should help you differentiate between the two. Also, you could add event listener to the UIScrollbar in your answerDisplay Class to capture the event and then suppress it via stopPropagation().

Depending on how UIScrollbar uses event bubbles internally, you can try either stopPropagation(), either stopImmediatePropagation(). The goal is to stop the event bubbling up from answerDisplay, but not breaking the UIScrollbar functionality.