Button Click Counter not incrementing - actionscript-3

Question

I have a similar animation in Flash with a replay button at the bottom. Once the animation completes, it does not loop. Instead if you click replay, the animation starts again.
I want a textbox which will display the amount of times the button was pressed.
My existing code is currently replaying the animation. It's incrementing the count to 1 (from 0) in trace but not getting set within the textbox. Additionally, if I click the button again, trace displays 1 again -- no increment occurred (1 to 2, 2 to 3, etc).
If I comment out gotoAndPlay(1), the incrementing works just fine and is displayed in the textbox -- but the animation does not play again.
What am I doing wrong?
import flash.events.MouseEvent;
var hitcount:Number = 0;
textCounter.text = String(hitcount);
function incCounter(event:MouseEvent):void
{
hitcount++;
textCounter.text = String(hitcount);
trace(hitcount);
gotoAndPlay(1);
}
replay_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, incCounter);

Answer 1

The problem in your code is that you are creating and initializing every time your counter, so sure you will get every replay the value 1.
So to avoid that, you can just verify if you have already created the hitcount var otherwise create it :
if(!hitcount){ // hitcount is null, so create it
var hitcount:Number = 0;
}
As a good practice, you can also remove the MouseEvent.CLICK on your button if you don't need it. So you get something like this :
if(!hitcount){
var hitcount:Number = 0;
}
count.text = hitcount.toString();
function incCounter(event:MouseEvent):void
{
event.target.removeEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, incCounter);
hitcount++;
count.text = hitcount.toString();
gotoAndPlay(1);
}
replay_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, incCounter);
Hope that can help.

Answer 2

If your flash movie is longer than one frame then the layer which you are placing your actions on the stage needs to extend that amount of frames as well. Otherwise the code is no longer there after frame 1. Also when you come back to frame 1 you are attaching yet another mouse event each time. Start your code with yourButton.removeEventListener to ensure you are only ever attaching one event to it. And every time the movie ends and goes back to frame 1 your counter is reset to 1.