Theo’s Blog

uncleunvoid asked me to help him construct a loop that generates TextFields that make use of an embedded font. I thought this should be easy (easy in a relative sense, building things in Flash is never easy) but I did not succeed on my first try. I’ve become accustomed to the fact that the obvious solutions often do not work and that questioning that is a useless waste of time. Finding solutions to your Flash problems is a process of non-rational trial en error testing. Today, through luck, my second attempt succeeded and here is the code that I put in the first frame of a empty .fla file;

stop();

var textFormat = new TextFormat();
textFormat.font = “MyEmbeddedFont”;

for(var i:Number = 0 ; i < 10 ; i++)
{

for(var j:Number = 0; j < 10; j++)
{

var textFieldName:String = “test “+i+”_”+j;
_root.createTextField(textFieldName, _root.getNextHighestDepth(), i*50, j*30, 50, 30);
_root[textFieldName].text = textFieldName;
_root[textFieldName].embedFonts = true;
_root[textFieldName].setTextFormat(textFormat);

}

}

Now, the crucial thing to make this work is to have an embedded font that is “exported for actionscript” with the identifier “MyEmbeddedFont”.

If you embedded and exported your font the right way, your result should look similar to this. (I used a “Georgia” font).

Hope this helps! If not let me know.

If you’ve used Flash MovieClips events onRollOver, onRollOut, onRelease, onReleaseOutside or onPress you’ve probably encountered the annoying little Flash shortcoming, that you can’t define mouse event-handlers on MovieClips contained inside MovieClips that have a mouse event defined.

Suppose you have something like this:

this.onRelease = doSomething;
this.createEmptyMovieClip(“childMC”,this.getNextHighestDepth());
var childMC:MovieClip = this["childMC"];
//Add some code to put something inside childMC
childMC.onRollOver = doSomethingElse;

The code in the function doSomethingElse will never be reached, because all mouse events are “caught” by childMC’s parent MovieClip.

A workaround that I use is to check in the parent functions whether the events apply to children.

Here’s an example for the onRelease event:

this.onRelease = function()
{

if (childMC.hitTest(_root._xmouse, _root._ymouse, true)) {

doSomethingElse();

}

}

The MovieClip function hitTest is used to test whether the mouse is hovering above the childMC when released. hitTest takes as arguments the x and y coordinates of the mouse relative to the _root MovieClip and a boolean that specifies whether to do the hitTest using the actual MovieClip shape (true) or just it’s bounding box (false).

Delegation

Sometimes you may want to base the logic in a mouse handling event on data that’s stored in another MovieClip, of course you can expose the decisions variables by making them public variables and accessing them through some relative path like _parent.var1 or this.childMC.var1 but a cleaner solution might be using Flash delegate creator available in Flash 8 professional. I learned how to use it through this Delegate tutorial. With delegates you can define mouse event handlers that execute in a object scope other then the MovieClip object scope on which they are defined! This how I used it for example. I had a ‘parent’ MovieClip showing a JPG image. In the MovieClip was ‘child’ MovieClip called zoomer, that when pressed should open a new browser window containing a high-res version of the JPG. I sensed that it would be better program design to have the knowledge about the image low-res and high-res version in the ‘parent’ MovieClip. Without use of a Delegate I should have either copied the knowledge of the high-res JPG to the child MovieClip or exposed that knowledge through the parents public interface. In my humble opinion the delegate approach is the cleanest, really leaving all the data and logic concerning JPG’s in the parent MovieClip.

Here’s how I used the delegate functionality:

import mx.utils.Delegate;
zoomer.onRelease = zoomer.onReleaseOutside = Delegate.create(this, handleOnRelease);

Here is again a post in a series of posts documenting Flash and ActionScript behaviours I wish I had known about before finding it out the hard way, that is finding it out after a long time of trials and errors. Today I was trying to adjust the alignment of htmlText insinde a Flash TextField. Since the TextField has no align property by itself, I figured that using a TextFormat object and setting it’s align property would do the trick. I was wrong.

This was how I tried to align the htmlText in my TextField;

var myTextFormat:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
myTextFormat.align = “right”;
myTextField.setTextFormat(myTextFormat);

But for reasons that are unclear to me, this does not work. After long research I found a way that does work. It’s by using the TextField.autoSize property. “autoSize” is a name that in my humble opinion doesn’t convey much of it’s purpose. But here is what Adobe says it does. In a nutshell, the autoSize property helps you set alignment and resizing behaviour in one statement. To say autoSize=”right” is equal to instructing the TextField to align it’s text to the right and re-size the TextField to the left if needed. So here is how I used it;

myTextField.autoSize = “right”;

Piece of cake once you know it.

Yesterday I posted how to properly copy an ActionScript Array.

Here is an recursive implementation that allows to deep-copy objects (other then MovieClips);

/// duplicate any given Object (not MCs)

Object.prototype.copy = function()
{

var _t = new this.__proto__.constructor(this) ;
for(var i in this)
{

if(typeof this[i] == “object”)

_t[i] = this[i].copy()

else

_t[i] = this[i];

}

return _t;

};

ASSetPropFlags(Object.prototype,["copy"],1);

I found this code here. Thanks klitze7-c004, I will use this method from now on to copy Arrays , this way I’m sure that the contents get copied as well.

Of course this is how it’s used.

var x:Array = new Array(“1″,”2″,”3″,{a:1,b:2});
var y:Array = x.copy();