Flash Accordion Menu - expertise sought!

programming flash
1

Hi everyone. I’m new to this so bear with me. I’m hoping someone can help me out here with a flash accordion menu on my site.

http://www.themilitary.co.uk

switch site to Army of Me and you’ll find it on the left. The fla file can be downloaded at:

http://www.themilitary.co.uk/aom/images/aom_nav0.fla

Ok heres the problem – probably familiar to anyone whose dealt with these things before and you can spot it immediately when you use the menu: I need a way to keep the section open on the menu when you click on a subnav option. I have little understanding of actionscript and it took me a while just to get the menu to work and look the way it does (i didnt build it from scratch obviously). But i did build the entire site so i have some knowledge of html. I am guessing i need to pass a variable from each html page to direct the movie to ‘stay open’ at certain points. What this code might look like and where it would go is beyond me at the minute. If someone would be kind enough to download the fla file and give me an idea of what code needs to go in each page i’d be very grateful.

Thanks in advance – Antony

2

I think you need to look at making the buttons stay active first.

i use dynamic text fields calling an array:

menu = new Array();
menu[0] = “button1”;
menu[1] = “button2”;
menu[2] = “button3”;
etc…

function select(n) // n is the button to activate
{
for(i=0; i<menu.length; i++)
{
_root.movieclip_mc[menu*].gotoAndStop(“up”);
}

_root.movieclip_mc[menu[n]].gotoAndStop("active");

}

with this as2 on the buttons mc named ‘movieclip_mc’ -

onClipEvent(load)
{
this.Label.text = “WORDS TO APPEAR ON BUTTON”;

}

/// then inside the button mc have three named frames, 5 frames apart - up, over and active, with corresponding code on each frame:
//UP
Label.textColor = 0x777777;
this.onRollOver = function()
{
this.gotoAndStop(“over”);
}
this.onRollOut = function()
{
this.gotoAndStop(“up”);
}
stop();

// OVER

Label.textColor = 0x000000;
stop();

// ACTIVE

Label.textColor = 0x999900;
delete this.onRollOver;
delete this.onRollOut;
stop();

then of course have a layer wiith the dynamic text field with the name ‘Label’

hope that helps?

Anyway, if you know HTML well, then you shouldnt be too scared of javascript - maybe try looking at http://mootools.net/ or http://script.aculo.us/ for their nifty programming abilities, support and demos. Maybe even look at loading dynamic pages using AJAX - start with looking at the AJAX demo used over at http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/

theses are all very good alternatives should no one be able to help you with any Flash through here