Flash components overview

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Overview

Components are prebuilt interface elements. This is part of Flash CS3 tutorials.

Learning goals

Learn how to create and use some Flash 9 (CS3) components

Learn a little bit of Action Script 3.0 to run something with a button.

Prerequisites

Flash CS3 desktop tutorial

Flash drawing tutorial

Moving on

The Flash article has a list of other tutorials.

Quality

This text should technical people get going and may not be good enough for self-learning beginners. It can be used as handout in a "hands-on" class. That is what Daniel K. Schneider made it for...

Level

It aims at beginners. More advanced features and tricks are not explained here.

The execturive summary

Flash has a few built-in components (called widgets or gadgets in other contexts) and the will allow to you to build an interactive environment more quickly than by coding all by yourself.

However, using these components still requires basic knowledge of ActionScript. In this article we will try to show a few design patterns that you can copy and adapt.

The executive summary - buttons

• Open the component library (Window->Components or CTRL-F7)
• Drag a component to the stage
• Fill in some Parameters
• Add some action script

Introduction

ActionScript (AS2) and ActionScript (AS3)

• In CS3, a component library is available for both.
• The AS3 one is smaller as you can see in the screenshot below:

Flash CS3 component library

To open the component library

• Window->Components or CTRL-F7
• I suggest to dock it against your library.

A slideshow with the AS 3 button component

In this example we will work with five layers:

• Actions: will include a little Action Script code

Get a button from the library

• Open the component library, select "User Interface" and drag the button to the stage

Button of the Flash CS3/ActionScript 3 component library

Results

There is a slideshow with the components button:

• http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/flash/ex/components-intro/