Macromedia Flash Professional 8 UNLEASHED [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Loading External Content into Text Fields

Introduced in the Flash Player 7 is the ability to embed images as well as SWF files right into dynamic text fields. This is accomplished with the use of the <img> tag. And as you can see, because the files are brought in by means of a305 tag, the text fields must b296-enabled.

The <img> tag has several attributes that can be changed and manipulated:

• src
  This attribute is the path to the file to be brought in.

• id
  The instance name of the movie clip being created by the Flash player to hold the embedded file; it is useful if you want to manipulate the movie clip with ActionScript.

• width
  The width of the file being embedded, in pixels.

• height
  The height of the file being embedded, in pixels.

• align
  Controls the horizontal alignment of the embedded file; left or right are the allowable parameters, and the default is left.

• hspace
  Specifies the horizontal space around the embedded file between the file and the text. The default value is 8.

• vspace
  Specifies the vertical space around the embedded file between the file and the text. The default value is 8.

Those are all the attributes for the <img> tag, so let's go over an example of loading in an image:

//set th296 text to the text field
imageText_tx311Text = "<img src='bigBen.jpg' width='200' height='200'>Big Ben!!!";

The preceding code simply sets the property of the text field to the text we want to display, plus the image tag that will embed the image.

Test the movie, and you will see a text field with an image and some text in it as shown in Figure 19.9.

To continue with this example, we are going to embed the clock SWF file under the image.

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//add the clock SWF file
imageText_tx311Text += "<img src='clock.swf' width='150' height='50' align='right'>What
< img src="/image/library/english/13886_ccc.gif"> time is it?";

This line of code adds the clock.swf file to the text field, as well as some more text.

Test the movie again, and now you will see the clock in the text field as well as the image, as in Figure 19.10.

Now we have embedded files into text fields. What if we want to manipulate them?

Manipulating Embedded Content in Text Fields

You can control embedded content in text fields using the

id attribute within the <img> tag. You simply give the movie clip that is containing the embedded content an instance name, and then you can refer to it in ActionScript.

Follow these steps continuing from the preceding example:

//set th296 text to the text field
imageText_tx311Text = "<img src='textBox.swf' id='myContent'> _ text field";
//now create the function that will continually run
this.onEnterFrame = function(){
//constantly send information to the text field
imageText_txt.myContent.myText_txt.text = getTimer();
}

The preceding code uses the <img> tag to place a SWF file in the text field along with some text. Then we create a callback function that will fire continually, thereby sending the result of the getTimer() function to the text field constantly.

Test the movie and you will see the text field within the text field constantly being updated by the getTimer() method.

We have covered a lot of different ways you can bring content into Flash, but so far, all the examples we have used have brought content into Flash while Flash was running locally on our computer. This means that the transfer has been almost instant. In the real world, this would not be the case because SWFs and images take time to load, and that's where preloaders come in.