parenting a child to a parent that has expressions

hi,
i'm trying to parent a child to a parent that has a wiggle expression on it.
when i pick whip the child to parent, nothing happens because there is still no
animation in the actual transformation parameters of the parent. the XY movement
is in the "effect" transformation. if i option click to add an
expression onto the transform of my child and then pick whip that to the
transform on the "effect" transform of the parent, my layer goes out
into space somewhere. how could i parent the child to the XY movement of the
wiggle effect.

Try adding this expression to the child's position property:

value + parent.effect("Transform")("Position")

Thanks for the quick reply!

When I first put this expression in, I got an error saying it Couldn't find
effect named "Transform". I noticed that in the effects pulldown,
there's a parenthesis around the name Transform, so I changed the expression to
this:

value + parent.effect("(Transform)")("Position")

it then allowed the expression, but it merely moved my object somewhere and it
still didn't inherit the parent's translation information.

Before I added that expression, I pick whipped the child to the parent so it
knew where to get it from.

Did I do something wrong?

Hard to say - it works for me (if I understand what you're trying to do). Did
you rename the transform effect for some reason?

Here's all I did:

1. Create a solid
2. Create another solid, and move it some distance from the first one
3. Make the second solid the child of the first.
4. Apply the Transform effect to the first solid.
5. Apply this expression to Position property of Transform effect:

wiggle(5,200)

6. Apply this expression to child's Position property:

value + parent.effect("Transform")("Position")

thanks again for the reply! when i go thru the steps that you say above, it does
totally work for me, but here's my catch. when i create the wiggle effect, i'm
going thru the animation preset - wiggle-rotation.ffx. it's putting this
expression in my parent node's Transform section: anchorPoint.

then i can control the wiggle effect with Wiggle Speed and Wiggle Amount, which
are my two options in the Effects --> Wiggle-Rotation pull-down menu. if i
put in the following, wiggle(5,200), it changes the position and movement of the
object and doesn't give me the controls that i've listed above. know what i
mean?

although it's interesting that when i put the expression in that you
recommended, my child DID follow the motion of the parent. but without that
expression "wiggle (5,200)" in there, it did nothing. it's like i need
some type of null expression or something that allows the child to link up to
that and inherit the motion of the wiggle effect.