How to output both AS objects and drawn objects on pages?

1

Using Flash 8;

Hello,

I am building a site entirely in actionscript and the “shell” of the site, the pages, text, static images, come up and work fine, no problems.

However, I’m having troubles trying to implement Kirupa’s “XML_Flash Photo Gallery”, for one of my pages, link here:

http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx2004/xml_flash_photogallery.htm.

I’m running into troubles because my pages are entirely actionscript and this tutorial uses objects which were drawn by the drawing tool.

I have been trying to get both actionscript and drawn objects to work together and cannot get it right!!

Questions:

  1. In terms of layering or frames, What is the best way to output on your pages both “objects drawn by the Flash drawing tools” and “actionscript objects”?

Is this better handled using frames or layers? Should I place my actionscript on the first few frames, then my “drawn objects” on the later frames? Or use layers and have my AS code above or below the manually drawn objects?

For example:

I have my actionscript on layer 1. Then use drawing tools to draw a box on layer 2.

When published, I want the “manually drawn box” and “the actionscript drawn objects” to both be viewable on the pages. Do I place the “drawn” layer above or below the

actionscript layer? Or should this be handled by frames?

I have tried both and neither seem to work for me. When I do one or the other, it works, meaning, all drawn objects, obviously things are viewable, then if

I use all actionscript, things are viewable, but when I try to combine both, the manually drawn objects do not show up.

The actionscript objects show up correctly, but I cannot see the objects I have directly drawn on-stage.

In my actionscript, I use, “_root.getNextHighestLevel()”, for each of the objects, this works fine for all the actionscript objects. However, I did nothing

for the objects drawn using the tools, should I attach the same “_root.getNextHighestLevel()” to those objects drawn on-stage?

Or,

  1. Should I try to draw Kirupa’s objects on my pages using actionscript?

Thanks, any help is great!!

Dave.