swapDepths problems

I figured it out and it turns out it was something rather silly. You were SOOO close when you asked if I was creating more than one instance of ItemBox. As I said, I was appending getNextHighestDepth to the ItemBox's _mc name to keep from multiple MovieClips on the same level with the same name, but I wasn't doing that with my ItemGroups, so when I was creating two ItemGroups, they both had a _root.group_mc MovieClip, which were conflicting with eachtoher. I'm not really sure why it was causing the errors it was causing, or why Flash even let me create a second MovieClip with the same name (I remembered in previous versions, if you did this, the original MovieClip would disappear and be replaced by the new one, but this time they were both there) but when I fixed it, the swapDepth worked flawlessly. Thanks for all you guidance though, it helped me get my head in the right place!

Well, there is a private variable called "_mc" in both ItemGroup and ItemBox, but that shouldn't mean anything. But the function that contains the swapDepth is within ItemBox, and I'm referencing _mc in a bunch of other lines immediately after the swapDepth call without any ambiguity as to which _mc it is referencing. Each instance of ItemBox only has one private variable "_mc".

That trace would output movieclip. _mc is a private variable in ItemBox that is a reference to the MovieClip that is created when it's instantiated. I'll attach the first few lines of the constructor for ItemBox so you can see what I mean.

I don't have components, but I have two external .as files that I'm instantiating objects with, which is where the swapDepth is happening. Let me see if I can explain this without convoluting the details.

I have two .as files, ItemGroup, and ItemBox. ItemGroup get passed a parent_mc when it is instantiated from my SWF (in this case, it's _root) and creates a new MC called "group_mc" on the parent_mc level (e.g. parent_mc.createEmptyMovieClip("group_mc",parent_mc.getNextHighestDepth());).

ItemGroup also has a function called addItem, which instantiates a new ItemBox, passing group_mc to ItemBox, which is where each new itemBox will create it's MovieClips. So itemBox creates an "itembox_mc" movieclip that is attached to group_mc, and all the MCs within itemBox are attached to itembox_mc. (It also appends the depth to the mc name as to not have two mc's with the same name, I just left this out for simplicity).

So so far we have: _root.group_mc.itembox_mc, where group_mc was created within ItemGroup and itembox_mc was created within ItemBox. ItemGroup was the only class instantiated from my SWF, with ItemGroup.addItem being called from the swf as well. Hopefully this all makes sense so far.

Now here comes the swapDepth. I have it in ItemBox that the itembox_mc is being referenced by a private variable called "_mc", so on instantiation I have _mc.onRelease = this.open, which calls a function within ItemBox called "open()". In the open function, I have a call:

_mc.swapDepths(_mc._parent.getNextHighestDepth());

I thought the reason this wasn't working was because _mc._parent is a MovieClip that was created in a different class, but even when I replace _mc._parent.getNextHighestDepth with a number I know is not being used, it still doesn't work. Also, I can trace everything and it comes out fine:

trace(_mc.getDepth());
trace(_mc._parent.getNextHighestDepth());
_mc.swapDepths(_mc._parent.getNextHighestDepth());
trace(_mc.getDepth());

will output:

1
4
1

When if it worked it would output 1,4,4, which it doesn't even do if I hardcode the 4 in the swapDepth. So yeah, sorry to drop all of that on you, but hopefully you can help me out because I'm really in a bind! Thanks!