… or, “The Case of the Disappearing Assets”
Say you are developing a set of components, and some of these components are contained within some others. For example, you have a Button component which contains a Label component. Or a ComboBox component which contains a List component.
You probably have an assets layer in the containing component (i.e. Button), which contains an instance of the sub component (Label).
I noticed that occasionally these assets were disappearing from the assets layer. Everything was working fine, and then suddently I couldn’t get the button to display a label. Or the combo box no longer would show its drop down list. Somehow that asset had been deleted. But I swear I didn’t do it!
Finally realized what was happening. Quite often I like to test out live preview and component parameter stuff by converting a component to a compiled clip. When I’m done, I delete the compiled clip from the library. I’m not touching the actual component symbol, so I didn’t think there’d be any problem.
But what happens is that Flash converts every instance of that component in the movie to the compiled clip version. This included the instances in the assets layer of your components in the library. Then, when you delete the compiled clip, there goes your asset.
That is all.