After working with the previous version of the sliders -se previous post-. I had the opportunity to "upgrade" the sliders since there was a slight chance that the sliders had to react to only one button rather than two as originally planned. Needless to say it wasn't required to apply this update but it came out nice. Once again there was no need to update anything in the class but just 2 extra lines of code.

Here is the sample and feel free to play with it

**Warning** The linkage identifier 'RewindBtn' was already assigned to the symbol 'FLVPlayer_assets/Buttons/Rewind', and cannot be assigned to the symbol 'FLVPlayer_assets/Buttons/Rewind', since linkage identifiers must be unique.

But in reallity I only had 1 button called Rewind with the Link ID of RewindBtn and nothing else. I even created a blank FLA and pasted the simbol by itself in the blank FLA but I still were getting the same warning.

Well after doing a search online and trinkering with flash I figured out that originally I had created the Symbol as button and then transformed the Button to a MovieClip within the Library but never changed the  Button to a MovieClip within the Properties panel in Flash.

Go figure! the warning has gone away.

So if you are trying to connect to a dabase within your application what GoDaddy recommends is to use mysql.secureserver.net as your hostname. Maybe this could have worked while back but that information is not true for all servers.

If you are having problems all you have to do is login to your GoDaddy control panel and look what server has GoDaddy assigned for you, at least that is how it worked out for me.

In our previews tutorial
we learned how we can place our code in one place and assign actions
to severan Movie Clips at once rather than one by one.

and here it is the code to do that:


//initialize your prototypes
MovieClip.prototype.RollOver = function()
{
this.gotoAndPlay(2);
};

Now, how about loading dynamic content? In this case I am going to
show you how to load txt files, then you can modify the code to load
swf, jpgs or what ever other information you need in your movie.

The only piece of code we are going to modify is the folowing:


MovieClip.prototype.Release = function()
{
this.gotoAndStop(1);
MainMovie.gotoAndPlay(2);
//this are the 2 lines that we will add to our code
var finalpath = ("text/" + this._name + ".txt").toLowerCase();
loadVariables(finalpath,textHolder);
};


Let me tell you what is going on in the code above with the 2 new lines we
added.

First of all we declare a new variable called finalpath. We assign the values
"text/" that means that all our files will be stored in the folder named text.
After that we attach the name of the MovieClip by using "this._name" the benefit
of fetching the name automaticly is to save us coding time. And finally we
add the extension ".txt" to our variable.

You might be wondering what is the ".toLowerCase()" doing there. Well that
is just to ensure that the files we are looking for are in lower case. In case
we named our MovieClips some thing like MywEIrdNameMovieClip, it will be changed
to myweirdnamemovieclip. That will make it easier for us in naming our files
and folders.

That is it!. Here it is a preview of how the code works like.

Download the files self-extract

S J Mangold Asked at flashnewbie mailing list the following question:

I could use some help with the next step in my programming education.

I have a set of buttons that typically are enabled/disabled at the same
time. Currently, I write code for each button. There's got to be a way that
I can handle this more simply but don't have a clue as to what it would be.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Sue

There are many ways of solving this problem, you can do it with a function, using the call command or creating a prototype.

We will cover the prototype solution.

Lets pretend we have 50 Buttons on our stage, each button contains the following script:


on (rollOver){
gotoAndPlay(2);
}

on (release){
gotoAndStop(1);
MainMovie.gotoAndPlay(2);
}


Using the method above will take us a long time to finish our project, and
if we are required any changes it will be difficult, specially if we are
required to change the name MainMovie from our target. We would have
to go to each button and change the script.

Here it is where we introduce the word prototype, in this case we will only use it with our MovieClips. The perfect match, or so I believe!

Now, I am not here to give you a detail information in prototype, class, inheritance
and such. I am here to give you an answer and help you find new ways of coding.

The code is as follows:


MovieClip.prototype.RollOver = function()
{
this.gotoAndPlay(2);
};

MovieClip.prototype.RollOut = function()
{
this.gotoAndStop(1);
ndStop(1);
};


If you take a close look to the 2 pieces of code from above you will find
there is no much difference between both of them. Now you may ask How do I
attach the second piece of code to each one of my Movie Clips?

First of all lets finish our code part and then i show you how to attach the
code to your Movie Clips.


MovieClip.prototype.Allfunctions = function(){
this.onRollOver = RollOver;
this.onRollOut = RollOut;
this.onRelease = Release;
}


That is all you need! Looking at the code above we can see how this.onRollOver
is equal to Rollover which is the first prototype we defined. Then this.onRollOut
= RollOut and so on. That was easy uh?

Now it gets better. This is how we attach our script to each one of our MovieClips.


MovieClip1.Allfunctions();
MovieClip2.Allfunctions();
MovieClip3.Allfunctions();
//....and so on to 50


Now you might say, I don't want to write MovieClip1.Allfunctions(), all the
way to 50, well we can write another small piece of code that will do that
for us.


for (var i = 1; i <51;i++){
this["MovieClip"+i].Allfunctions()
}


Now lets put all our code together:


//initialize your prototypes
MovieClip.prototype.RollOver = function()
{
this.gotoAndPlay(2);
};

Wow!, that was easy, in just a few lines of code we created all of our actions,
Now we can spend more time making our buttons beautiful rather than programming
each one of them.

To finish let me tell you, now that we have placed all of our code in one
place if later on we decided to change the name of our MainMovie all we have
to do is change it in one place and we are done.

That is it!

I hope you enjoyed it, The next tutorial will cover how to load dynamic content
with this same approach.

...helmut