Hello all, I’m looking for some assistance with a 3-tier menu system I’ve built. I have the finished product, which I’ll post for you to view, but it’s clearly not the most logical or efficient way of doing it. As you’ll see, the menu consists of 3 columns and 7 rows, equaling 21 cells in total. Each cell has an invisible button filling the entire dimension of the cell which has code on it that not only controls that cell, but all of the surrounding cells as well. Reason being, when you rollover one of the buttons in the first column it expands the links in the second column, and so on. That said, I couldn’t use a ‘onRollout’ command due to the fact that once you rolled your cursor off of the button in the first column to move onto the links in the second column, the links in the second column would disappear. But, what I’ve found with this approach is that, due to the fact that this menu is being nested within a hybrid site, anytime you roll your cursor off of the left, right, or bottom with the menu tree expanded, it will remain expanded until you rollover any of the buttons in that flash file that tell it to collapse. Consider this problem #1. The second problem, which you’ll notice I’ve gotten to partially work, is that whenever you are in a particular section of the site, that link should be highlighted within the menu…which often times requires the menu to remain expanded. This is obviously done by passing a variable between the HTML and the Flash files (you can view what code I’ve thrown in there in an attempt at getting this to work, in the first keyframe of the _root of the attached .fla).
I have, what I would consider to be, a mid-level knowledge of Flash. So, with that said, I know there’s probably a way of controlling the functionality of this menu entirely by AS, but I haven’t a clue as to where to get started. I would assume it could be done by tracking the coordinates of your cursor…whether that’s the easiest, or most intuitive way of doing it, I’ll leave for you to decide.
I greatly appreciate anyone who is willing to take the time to look into this for me. However, if you are one of the few who are brave enough to tackle this beast of a menu, then there are a few things you must know before beginning.
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As mentioned, the most important thing is to make sure that when you are in a particular section of the site (i.e., ‘Clients -> Markets’) that the menu remain expanded to that section and the respective link remains “lit”.
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Anytime you roll your cursor out of the menu area it should default back to the highlighted section you are in, as per #1.
That should just about do it. If you need anything else from me please let me know. Again, much thanks to anyone willing to look into this for me.