When creating a movie clip with an associated AS 2.0 class (using the Linkage dialog for the symbol), any components on that movie clip cannot be accessed in the constructor of the class. References to the component instances will be non-null, but they’ll appear as plain movieclip instances and not have any of the methods or fields from their component classes.

Say for example we have a movie clip symbol which contains a TextInput component with an instance name of passwordInput. We associate an AS 2.0 class called PasswordWindow, which extends MovieClip, with the movie clip’s symbol in the library. If we declare passwordInput as a field in PasswordWindow, in the constructor function passwordInput will be non-null and have a type of “movieclip”. Its regular MovieClip fields and methods will work — passwordInput._x will represent he horizontal position, for example. However, TextInput fields such as passwordInput.text will not work.

The solution is to access the components in the onLoad handler instead of the constructor. Whereas passwordInput.text = “foo” will not work in the constructor, the same code will work in an onLoad function (which overrides the default implementation from the MovieClip superclass). This problem probably has something to do with the order in which elements within the movie clip are initialized with respect to the movie clip’s AS 2.0 code.