Do I always have to use a WaitForChild() after a Clone()?

Help and Feedback Scripting Support
#1

I have an ImageLabel with a child TextLabel, inside StarterGui:

image

I purposely leave these items inside StarterGui as templates to populate a ScrollingFrame that has already been replicated inside Players.

local ItemOrig 	= game.StarterGui.ScreenGui:FindFirstChild("ImageLabel", true)
local Item = ItemOrig:Clone() -- from StarterGui (Item is the cloned "ImageLabel")
Item.Parent = MyFrame -- in game.Players
Item.Image = someValue
Item.TextLabel.Text = someText -- here SOMETIMES I get an error

The last line sometimes generates an error, and looking inside Players, there is only the ImageLabel (TextLabel) is not there yet.

Do I always have to use a WaitForChild after a clone?

#2

It is not the clone that is erroring, but probably findfirstchild returning nil since the label hasn’t loaded in

#3

An “error” doesn’t help anyone other than saying you’ve got a problem without telling what it might be. And no you don’t need to use WaitForChild if the object already exists like when you clone it it should already exists.

#4

That’s my question: like WaitForChild, will Clone yield the current thread until the cloned object is fully loaded?

#5

Unsure if it’ll yield but it’s slower cloning an object rather than having it already exist and cframing it to the position needed.

#6

Well, I got the error again and it’s something like TextLabel is not a valid member of ... (the Players replicated Gui).

There, only ImageLabel was cloned (its child TextLabel was not):

image

So I had to create a WaitForChild for the TextLabel:

...
Item.Image = someValue
local T = Item:WaitForChild("TextLabel")
T.Text = someText -- now it's working...

So, answering my own question:

If a cloned object has children, you must YES use WaitForChild for each child of the cloned parent :point_left:

1 Like