Article
Co-ordinate Your Flash Site
Before You Modularize
That said, here are a few instructions that may be of benefit to other newbies. These are things that should be determined before you modularize your Website.
- Make a list of all the intended interactions that could take place between the buttons/routines that you plan to modularize and their "environment." For navigation buttons, you might want to consider whether their (intended) operation should be constrained by, or subject to the operation of other buttons.
- Determine which commands will be necessary for the modularized buttons/ routines to interact with their "environments" once they are modularized. While absolute references to the _root. may help considerably (see above), other techniques (e.g., loading smaller .swfs into different levels of a given movie) may work even better in certain instances.
- Determine where these commands will need to be issued from. If you want to include a quiz on your Website, Macromedia provides a few quiz templates in Flash MX, under the File menu. If you want to modularize the completed quiz and have it load in your main movie, it may have problems reporting its results. Answer: load it as a stand-alone program and call it (from a button on the main movie) into its own browser window.
- Determine when these commands will need to be issued. When coordinating actions, you'll find several places to load commands so that the website will operate as you intend. Sometimes, you'll want to issue commands from a button, sometimes from a movie, sometimes from a frame, sometimes from a browser window, sometimes from a JavaScript, etc, etc. Don't be afraid to think outside the box!
- Finally, determine (for yourself) how much time and effort you are able and willing to expend on a given project before you modularize it. As I hope to have shown here, each newly-created module brings with itself the additional requirement that it interact effectively with the rest of the Website. Alas, very little in life is automatic, and even less in Flash!
Bottom line: modularization is worthwhile, and should be done more often. But, since it's only half the equation -- you should know what it costs!