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Creating menus in Flash MX 2004

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Flash MX 2004 Data Components

Flash MX 2004 is aimed at providing developers with an easy and intuitive way of developing rich internet applications. To provide this level of sophistication to developers, Macromedia have provided developers with new tools in Flash MX 2004 Professional, such as a forms based paradigm for developing applications, better support for video and advanced data access components. In today's tutorial we will be discussing the new data components that are available in Flash MX 2004 Professional - what they are and how they work to make your life easier.

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Making A Flash MX 2004 Accordion Component

The accordion component can be built entirely by using the Component Inspector, and is new in Flash MX 2004 Professional. It contains a number of children movie clips, only one of which is displayed at a time.  To navigate between each of these child movie clips the accordion component provides a header button for that child that the user clicks to view the child.   The children can contain any information that you can have in a Flash movie clip – they can display text, images, movies of sections of a form that the user needs to fill out. Read More

Flash MX 2004 Forms

With the release of Flash MX 2004 there are a large number of additional UI (user interface) components available. Not only are there more components available, but they can now easily interact with one another.

In today's tutorial we will start by taking a look at the new components that are available and how to use them. Most of the new form components are available in Flash MX 2004 Professional only, and you will therefore need to have access to the trial version of Flash MX 2004 Professional to try out the examples.

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Validating and Submitting Flash Forms

Today we write our own ActionScript function to validate our Flash form. We see how the Flash form components have methods that we can use to access the values of the form components, be they combo boxes, list boxes, check boxes or simple text inputs.

In order to make our validation meaningful and complete, we clean up the form input by stripping leading and trailing white space from the input, as well as performing some basic testing to see if an email address is in the correct format. Because these functions are not native to ActionScript, we import them from external sources.

For people that filled the form in incorrectly, we build a dialog that displays the problems with the person's data entry. Once the data is validated, we build some root variables that contained the valid data and then send the information to a PHP script.

This is suitable for intermediate Flash developers, as it builds upon two previous beginner's tutorials, but reading those is not necessary, and the .FLA files are provided for download.

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Dynamic Form Data

Last week we learned how we could build a form in Flash using the built-in components that Flash provides. The main problem we had with the form was that the form components that provided selections had their values hard coded within the Flash MX editor.

In most situations this isn't a big problem, but in the case of our Country combo box, 200+ countries is too many to type in. Or what about a drop-down menu of products, when the product list changes daily? Today we'll look at how we can make the form more dynamic. To do this we'll look at some of the ActionScript methods that we have for altering the form components, and how we can grab the data for them from a PHP script.

This is article 2 in a series of 3:

1: Flash Forms

Creating basic form elements in Flash

2: Dynamic Form Data

Populating form elements in Flash from a dynamic source.

The database is MySQL and the populating scripts are built in PHP.

3: Form Submission

Covers Flash form validation using ActionScript and submitting the data to a server.

The form submission script is written in PHP and submits the data to a MySQL server

For those of you who didn't read last week's article, the Flash MX movie form_base.fla is available for download that contains the results of following the previous tutorial.

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Flash Forms

Today's article is the first in a series that covers building and using Flash forms. Flash forms are generally much more attractively designed than html forms because of the control you have over fonts etc in Flash. We will be covering from how to build the form to populating it with dynamic data, posting our results to a database and handling the response from our submission. Today we begin by looking at the elements that Flash provides for building forms and how they are used.

The sample FLA file is included for download so you can experiment with it or adapt it to your own needs.

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Transforming color in Flash Movie Clips

Our tutorial today shows you the nitty gritty of programatically changing the colour of movie clips in Flash. Besides looking at how we can set the colour, we also see how we can apply colour transformations by shifting the colour rather than simply setting it.

This way you only need a single symbol for your shape and using the Flash Color object you can make it any colour you wish. If you wanted to load 100 different coloured versions of the same object onto the stage, you would still only need the 1 symbol. This helps keep the file size of your Flash movie down to something manageable for those who still dial up with 56K modems.

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ActionScript: Flash Buttons with Style

In today's article, Allan shows you how to abstract all the parameters for his flash button into Actionscript, making a generic function that allows the Flash button to be controlled programmatically from outside Flash.

This 13 page article is suitable for beginners and intermediate Actionscripters and Dreamweaver users who wish to enhance the interactivity and look of buttons by using Flash.

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Flash MX Dynamic buttons

Today's tutorial takes concepts and techniques that were explained in the previous tutorial and expands on them to build a dynamic Flash button. The kinds of things that you will learn in today's article include how to get Flash to respond to your mouse, how to import graphics into Flash, what ActionScript is and how we can use it within Flash, creating basic animations for Motion Tweens and packaging it all neatly in a Server Behavior that we can use in Dreamweaver to quickly add our own dynamic buttons to our page.

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Flash In a flash #1: essential concepts of dynamic flash

In this new series, we look at Dreamweaver MX and Flash MX.

We start off by taking a look at what Dreamweaver can and can't do with Flash. The fact that there are some things that Dreamweaver can't do for us means that we dive into Flash and do that for ourselves. In order to do that takes a quick tour of the Flash MX interface and the basic terminology that you need in order to survive in a Flash world.

Along the way to becoming a master of Dreamweaver, Flash and PHP we'll be looking at how we can get information from PHP and databases into our Flash movies, how we can get information from our Flash movies to talk to PHP scripts and get it stored in databases and how we can use PHP to dynamically build up our Flash movies. The secrets of stages, scenes and ActionScript will all be revealed.

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