Next & previous Buttons

programming flash
1

I only have a couple of months experience in Flash. I know enough to make it dangerous—haha.
Cause I KNOW what I want to do & will spend hours working on achieving my goals!
The tutorial on navigation on this site is wonderful, so I have a good idea where to begin.
I have buttons:
Index taking you to contents of the module
help - takes you to a page that loads if you have no computer experience (which many of our users do not)
replay button—no big deal just restart at frame one.

HOWEVER Next & previous I haven’t got a clue to save myself where to begin. Although next & previous buttons are essentially like the forward & back buttons on a browser using the browser buttons are not an acceptable option. pages are numbered sequentially.
Example: dot01, dot02, dot03 and so on.

Is there an easy way to use actionscript for my next & previous buttons? I am a believer in tight file sizes & making things simple. Realistically I cannot spend my entire time this week just getting navigation to work. So If someone could point me in a direction with advice on doable—not doable or easy to understand (with my experience level) or forget it & try to work around it I would appreciate your feedback.

Thanks,
Janet

2

Hi Janet,
If your pages are in individual and consecutive frames you could use :

for you next button:
[AS]on(release){
nextFrame();
}[/AS]

and for your back button
[AS]on(release){
prevFrame();
}[/AS]

Is that what you want - hope it helps

SteveD

3

HI
Also If your pages aren’t consecutive frames you could place this code in the buttons actions:
[AS]
on(release){
gotoAndPlay(5)

[/AS]
where 5 is the frame number

or

[AS]
on(release){
gotoAndPlay(“dot01”)

[/AS]

where “dot01” is the frame label

But Instead of putting your actionscripts all over the place in different buttons, making it harder to find and edit, I prefer to have my A/S in the main timeline which can be done by rewritting the above code as follows:

[AS]
mybuttonname.onRelease = function() {
gotoAndStop(5);
};
[/AS]

4

Hi stimulateme,

[AS]mybuttonname.onRelease = function() {
mybuttonname.onRelease = function() {
gotoAndStop(5);
};[/AS]

Thats the code I prefer as well, I have stopped using flash buttons as I can do a lot more with mc’s, only thing is that Janet must remember to turn her buttons into mc’s, otherwise that code will not work

Cheers

SteveD

5

Thanks for the feedback, it started to begin to dawn on me last night just exactly how to do this, I didn’t have the code. But now I do.

Since I am relatively new at Flash, I have a tendency to forget that you can do a movie within a movie within a movie. Which I have used that for some of the stuff I have done it just didn’t dawn on me to use it for the entire project.

I believe this might solve some of our continuity questions.

I need to know just exactly how things load if I develop this further:
You have a big movie timeline carrying all the movies within the site.
When Flash loads–It goes to big movie starts at frame ! with page 1 movie.
I have a file size limit on the company server. Currently I’m not sure just what they consider acceptable limits. Does Flash load the entire big movie all at once if I do it this way? Or will Flash load page 1 at frame one, click next button, load page2 at x frame?

My interface in a boxed in TV set appearance.

Some of what we are doing is more suited for Dreamweaver & would take less time in there to complete the same task. Would like to use the interface for the entire project. I know you can open URL’s in Flash…my question is, can you open a page done in Dreamweaver into our flash interface? If so, where would I load the html page within the project on the server so when you got to page X which contained the Dreamweaver html it would be there?

I have this week to list all the benefits of streamlining our project in Flash. Previously each of our projects were done in director.

Thanks for the help
Janet

6

Hi Janet,
I guess when you say movies within a site you mean movie clips - right ?
Basically a flash movie loads in its entirety, but will start playing once the first frame is loaded, this is not always a good thing, for example if you have buttons on your first frame that progress a movie to a different scene/frame a user could click that button and go nowhere if the rest of the movie hasn’t finished loading. This is why preloaders are used, effectively they stall a movie at the very beginning until the entire movie has finished loading.

Another solution, if you want to keep your load times down, is to make your mc’ s seperate swf’s and load them when a button is clicked. The positive is that your main movie will load in a lot quicker, however there will be a space/pause whilst your secondary swf’s load in.

In short there are many solutions to this issue, it all depends what your requirements and the end result you want to achieve.
Try doing search for preloaders or look at the preloader tute to get a clearer idea.

I don’t know anything about dreamweaver, if you publish a DW file in html then the way to load it into flash is with a simple getURL action on a frame or button.
If DW is not published in HTML then I have no idea on that one.

Hope some of that helps, tho’ I am sure there are others around here that can offer you better advice than I

Cheers

SteveD

7

Many thanks Steve,
I will have to check into the load restrictions on the server.
Yup definately going with preloaders for sure. I’ve discussed that point with my coheart.

I will pass this info to the powers that be, (not me thank goodness!)
Looks like for right now I’ll load them as they have loaded the Director files in the past—separately rather than the as an entire site.

Thanks again!
Janet