Flash components overview

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Overview

Flash CS3 component library

Components are prebuilt interface elements (widgets) that will speed up programming of interactive Flash pages. 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.

Flash Video component tutorial

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 versions
• The AS3 one is smaller as you could see in the screenshot above

In this article we going to look at User Interface components

To open the component library

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

A menu-based slideshow with the AS 3 button component

Goal

The goal is to make a sort of simple Flash Webpage. The user at all times will have a menu to the left that will allow him to navigate to different contents.

We will build several versions of this. Have a look at the "standard" AS 3 menu-based slide show

Step 1- Planning the layers

In this example we will work with five layers:

• Actions: will include a little Action Script code
• Buttons: will include the buttons (displayed on all "pages")
• Pictures: Contents we want to display
• Credits: A special page for the "who's done it" (we also could have used the pictures layer for this).
• Background: A simple background that will remain stable.

So the timeline roughly will look like this:

Timeline of the menu-based slideshow

Create these layers now

Step 2 - Add pictures

• Decide how many pictures you want (we took four)
• Select the Pictures layer
• Layer 1 is reserved for a Title page.
• Create a few new empty keyframes (hit F7) and fill them with pictures. See Flash button tutorial#A_simple_slide_show_with_your_own_buttons_.28AS_2.29 button tutorial if you don't know how.

Step 3 - Get buttons from the library

• Select the buttons layer
• Open the component library, select "User Interface" and drag as many buttons to the stage as you have pictures. Add an extra one for the credits page.

Button of the Flash CS3/ActionScript3 component library

• Put them into a good position. You may use the Align panel to align and distribute propertly (see the Flash arranging objects tutorial if needed).

Step 4 - ActionScript 3 principles

ActionScript 3 does not allow to attach scripts to buttons. One can only script frames in the timeline. In order to script a component we bascially have to do three things.

1. Give name to the component (i.e. the movie instance)
2. Fill in some parameters, e.g. add a label for the button
3. Add some actionscript to the timeline that will:
   • Associate a user interaction event (e.g. user clicks) to some action function
   • Program the action function

Step 5 - DoIt

Parameters of the ActionScript3 butoon

Results

There is a slideshow with the components button:

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