Touch events in game object - actionscript-3

Question

In my Starling game, the player sprite is controlled by clicking the screen where you want to go. Since (AFAIK) you can't have touch events that happen outside a sprite activate handlers in the sprite, I put the handlers in the game object. Here's a basic idea of how it goes:
To create my listener, I do this within my game object:
this.addEventListener(TouchEvent.TOUCH, onTouch);
But onTouch is never called (I even tried putting a trace() in there).
Am I missing something here?

Answer 1

Well, you can make events that happen outside of a sprite to trigger the sprite's handlers, for this, you attach listeners not to the sprite, but to some other object, usually stage. Check if the stage is available, though. The best way to handle stage present is a listener to ADDED_TO_STAGE event. You put that into your handler object's constructor, and put all stage-aware code into that listener.
public function Handler() {
if (stage) init(null);
else addEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, init);
}
private function init(e:Event):void {
removeEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, init);
// entry point. This is where should stage-aware code start
stage.addEventListener(TouchEvent.TOUCH, onTouch);
// at this point stage is populated and valid, thus we can use stage reference
// without fear of null pointer.
}