force exit of mouseDown?

[Nicolas Cueto]

Actually, I'm not sure working with mouseDown is what'll help with what I'm after.

Say there's a grid of grouped objects thus:

 A. B. C. 
 D. E. F. 
 G. H. I. 
 J. K. L. 

and underneath that grid is a graphic

 "gcBkgnd"

which is opaque and a few pixels larger than the grid.

The effect I've scripted so far -- and which took much experimenting with co-ordinating mouseDown, mouseMove, mouseRelease and mouseUp -- allows the user to select the grouped objects by mouse-drag and then have those selected objects deleted upon mouse-release.

Problem is the selected objects should be contiguous. Thus, selecting objects J-G-D-A is ok, but not  J-D-A.

My first idea for a solution was to poll mouseMove in the grouped object's script with something like this:

 on mouseMove
   if the mouseLoc is not within rect of graphic gcBkgnd then
    send "doReset" to this card in 50 millisecs
    exit to top

I thought "exit to top" would bypass mouseDown, but it doesn't.

So I then tried the script of the background graphic similarly:

 on mouseLeave
   send "doReset" to this card in 50 millisecs
    exit to top

But, again, couldn't get away from how mouseDown doesn't allow other mouse-related events until it's done.

Assuming that all makes sense, what should I be doing instead? (And no suggestions about fingers or other parts of my anatomy :-) . )

Thanks

--
Nicolas Cueto (iPhone)