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Example 4 - Buttons Generated from Array

Intro : Example 1 : Example 2 : Example 3 : Example 4

Library

• button - Movie Clip: exported from library as "button"
• content - Movie Clip
• invisible - Button

Construction

• Button movieclip is built the same as previous examples
• No buttons are placed on stage. Content movieclip is in place with instance name of "content"
• Frame 1, actions layer, creates all the instances of the button and assigns values to the variables

Actionscript

Attached to invisible button on button movieclip timeline

on(release) {
  _parent.content.gotoAndStop(frame);
}

Attached to frame 1

buttonNames = new Array("Home", "Services", "Products", "Advantages", "Process", "Contact");
buttonHeight = 23;
for (i = 0; i < buttonNames.length; i++) {
  _root.attachMovie('button', 'button'+i, i);
  _root['button'+i]._x = 0;
  _root['button'+i]._y = i*buttonHeight;
  _root['button'+i].text = buttonNames[i];
  _root['button'+i].frame = i+1;
}

stop();

• In the first line, we create an array with all the button labels
• Line 2 sets the spacing of the buttons
• Lines 3 - 9 loop through each element of the array
• Line 4 attachs an instance of the button movieclip to the main timeline, giving it an instance name of 'button'+i, and a depth of i
• The next 2 lines set its position by modifying the _x and _y properties. We're dynamically grabbing the instance name: _root['button'+i].
• The following 2 lines set the text and frame variables. If our content frames weren't sequential, we could easily set up another array holding their values

Advantages

• Extremely easy to customize. Simply add an element to the array and a new button is automatically created. Just need to add corresponding content to content clip
• Could be made much more dynamic with little work: could change to button action to load a new movie clip into content, etc.

Disadvantages

• Very abstract - you don't see the layout in the authoring tool