Errors, Errors, everywhere but nary an idea what’s wrong

That’s the feeling we all get when we’re trying new things in Actionscript. Our FLA won’t publish because there’s some error and you’re thinking, “What the Frak does that mean?”

So here are a handful of common error messages that you get when using classes and what they mean.

The class or interface ‘<SomeClassName>’ could not be loaded.

You either have the path/namespace or the class name wrong. It’s probably a typo somewhere. As an example, if you are using the Holtzman class and you wrote this code:

var h:Holtzman = new Holtzman(....

You would get the above error because you either forgot to use the full namespace or to import the class. You could fix that by either doing this:

var h:com.polygeek.utils.Holtzman = new com.polygeek.utils.Holtzman(....

or this

import com.polygeek.utils.Holtzman;
var h:Holtzman = new Holtzman(....

The class being compiled, ‘<SomeClassName>’, does not match the class that was imported, ‘com.polygeek.utils.SomeClassName’.

This is easy. You have a class that you created in a specific namespace but you forgot to tell the class what namespace it’s in. Here’s an example: you have a class <SomeClass> in the com.polygeek.utils folder and the class declaration looks like this:

class SomeClass {

It should b:

class com.polygeek.utils.SomeClass {

The property being referenced does not have the static attribute.

This one is a tough one to describe unless you understand OOP in the first place. By example suppose you wrote the following code:

MovieClip._alpha = 50;

You know that doesn’t make any since because _alpha is a property of an individual MovieClip. You can’t set the _alpha of all MovieClips with code like that above. You would have to go to each instance of all MovieClips and change their _alpha individually.

A constructor may not specify a return type.

The constructor cannot have a return type, not even :Void. So your constructor looks like this:

public function SomeClassName() {...

Not like this:

public function SomeClassName():Void {...

As I think of more common errors I’ll add them to this page. Feel free to suggest your own in the comments and I’ll add them here.

Happy debugging.