How to use the Macromedia Flash Actionscript local connection object

posted: 06-09-05
author: PrimeVector
website: http://www.free-webmaster-resource.com
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advice

Readers that dont have Flash MX2004+ installed wont be able to use the tutorials that make use of the components. You can buy Macromedia Flash Pro 8 from here, or just download a trial first. This is the latest and best version of Flash and we can do nothing else but recommend it to everybody because we absolutely love it. This new edition opens up a lot more of the magic that was already there, and it certainly is a new fresh wind for us Flash developers. Its a great investment for the future.

What am i going to learn in this tutorial ?

Hello reader, im pleased you made the decision to learn more about the localConnection Object. I know it sounds a bit intimidating but rest assured its really not difficult at all. For certain things i found the LocalConnection object to be very useful and that is why i decided to share some of its usefulness with you. The LocalConnection object has a very nice way of setting up a connection between two different swf's. This is very useful when you have multiple swf's sitting in a html page and you want all of them to be able to contact each other and pass some data around.

In this tutorial we are going to setup two different swf's in a html file. The two swf's are connected to eachother and on the press of a button you can send a piece of text to the other swf. You can take this as far as you can, the possibilities are endless.

The two swf's we will create are inside a html page, this is necassary to make the localConnection work, it wont work in flash itself. So first we are going to setup the visuals and code for movieA.swf and then we'll setup the visuals and code for movieB.swf. We then create the html file to hold two swf's and can enjoy our newly learned skill and see it in effect. To learn more about the localConnection Object please visit this link.

Lets get our hands dirty

Download the source files for this tutorial and open movieA.fla. You will see two textboxes, two labels and a submit button. These are flash mx2004 components and are very easy to add. Just press crtl+f7 to open the flash components menu, drag and drop the components you want to use onto the main stage and select the properties box to give it a name. I used components because i didnt want the main focus of this tutorial be blurred with a load of information that isnt related to the localConnection Object and thus i chose for the ease of components.

Now have a good look at how i setup this file, as you can see i have a special layer i use for all the code. I really dislike the way a lot of people code and that is having code spread out all over the place. Code should be executed and controlled from a central place in your swf and should not be placed on objects like buttons etc. Having code in one place makes debugging your code a lot easier to do. You dont have to search in your swf when something goes wrong and this gives you a lot more control.

On the other layers there are two textInput components, two labels and a submit button. One of the input textboxes will be used to send text to the other swf, the other to display the received text. The button will be used to actually call the localConnection.send function to send the text to the other receiving swf. The labels are used to display some instructual text. If you dont know how to setup default text for a component, just do this. Add the component to the document, select it and in it properties box you can set the text under the parameters tab.

Select every item on stage and have a look at its properties box. You will notice every item has a name (called 'instance name') This name is used by actionscript to indenfify the items. Just like we use our names to indenfify ourselves. So only the items that need to be controlled by actionscript, like the input text and display text, must have an instance name.

Ok after having inspected all the items its time to start with the code. Select the first frame of the code layer and press f9. The actions frame will popup and you will see the code that is described on page 2 in front of you.

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