— tomauger.com

I was going through my archives and discovered a number of little demos and tests done in AS2, either to satisfy my own curiosity, or to answer questions posted on Experts Exchange. Here’s another one.

This demo illustrates the use of ExternalInterface to access the URI of the containing web page. This sort of thing becomes useful when handling deep linking within large Flash multi-page sites.

Workaround 1: Redesign

The solution is reasonably simple: tell your designers to insert a “landing” frame containing the stop() instruction in a frame BEFORE the actual frame that you will be jumping to. So, if you were doing gotoAndPlay(1), instead, have the designer insert a keyframe at frame 1, include the stop() action on that frame, and then duplicate that keyframe to frame 2, at which point you can start your animation loop. Now you’ll call gotoAndPlay(2).

Workaround 2: enterFrame()

Okay, so what if you don’t have the luxury of being able to modify the frame structure of the clip(s)? What if it’s rampant throughout your movie? We’ll make a little modification to our method for jumping to the frame in question.

(Bear in mind that this solution specifically addresses ActionScript 2 code):

buttonMC.onPress = function(){
	this.gotoAndPlay("down");
}
 
buttonMC.onRelease = buttonMC.onReleaseOutside = function(){
	this.gotoAndPlay("up");
	this.onEnterFrame = continuePlay;
}
 
function continuePlay(){
	this.onEnterFrame = function(){};
	this.play();
}

Here you can see that when we call gotoAndPlay() we attach an enterFrame handler that is responsible for doing two things:

1. call play() on the clip, to get it going again after the stop() was called from the frame script
2. clear itself (so you don’t call play() every single frame, essentially rendering any future frame script stop() commands useless)

Download Source

And to all you snobs…

Who are tempted to register just so you can post a snotty comment that “real Flash developers don’t use frame scripts anyway”, let me get a pre-emptive strike in. First of all, yes, you’re right. Real Flash devs have been trained (I didn’t say “brainwashed”…) to never use frame scripts. BUT, if you’re more than a grubby-haired teen working alone in his basement, you’ll know that in the real world we often work in these things called “teams”, where you have folk of all sorts of different expertise. We work with these guys called “designers” who can barely be convinced to open up the Actions panel and type the word stop followed by open and close brackets (“why!?!” they cry in despair. “Why the brackets??!”) and a (gasp) semicolon.

And these Designer types, they like to preview their flash movies. And they get really distressed when their buttons start flashing wildly and animating on their own. So we appease them by letting them do this one – and only this one – thing in an inline frame script.

Of course the proper way to do things is to call stop() on the movieClip in your Document Class init() method. And in fact, we’ve even found ourselves writing these complicated recursive methods that drill into every movieClip present on init and stop them programmatically. But like I said, often the designers live with the Flash far earlier in its project lifecycle than we do, so they insert all these little stop(); commands all over the place.

And there you have it.

Wow, speaking of “snotty”, those last two paragraphs were pretty snide. If you haven’t shut down your browser, purged my blog from your bookmarks (you did have my blog bookmarked didn’t you?) and removed me from your blogroll, well thanks for indulging my ranting ways. Speaking of ranting ways, just wait until you see my follow-up to my Apple rant. It’s a-brewin….