Flash Document

When we create a new file in Flash IDE, we save it in “.fla” document. We call this fla document as a Flash Document.

Every flash document got it’s  own time-line, Stage of given width and height.

We can think of a flash document like a real-world stage play. Both got stages, here actors are symbols. we can add, remove, change, modify actors through out the time line. Every Symbol has it’s own behavior, but we can customize and change as per the requirements.

By default document time line got one layer, we can add or remove layer as per the requirement. We add symbols to layers. Flash time line can contain 2 kinds of frames, Keyframes and Regular Frames.

Key frame: is a frame whose on-Stage content differs from the preceding frame.

Regular frame: by contrast, is a frame that’s on-Stage content is automatically carried over (repeated) from the preceding closest keyframe

Symbols and Instances

Flash support three types of symbols.

• Movie Clip (for animations with programmatic content)
• Graphic (for nonprogrammatic animations that can be previewed directly in the Flash authoring tool)
• Button (for simple interactivity)

When we create a symbol master copy of that symbol is stored in library. Whatever we see on the stage is instance of those symbols, aka related copies of that symbol. changing symbol affect all instances, but change instance doesn’t affect symbol.

Accessing child clips of a movie

getChildAt()
getChildByName()

Timeline Control

• play( )
• stop( )
• gotoAndPlay( )
• gotoAndStop( )
• nextFrame( )
• prevFrame( )
• currentFrame
• currentLabel
• currentLabels
• totalFrames