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Supplemental material

I recommend that you also study the other lessons in my extensive collection of online programmingtutorials. You will find a consolidated index at www.DickBaldwin.com .

General background information

In an earlier lesson titled Events, Triggers, and Effects , I taught you how to use the triggers and effects that are built into the ActionScript language.

In this lesson, I will teach you how to create your own custom effects. I will also explain two different programs thatuse a custom effect of my own design. I recommend that you run the online version of each of the two programs before continuing with the lesson.

Preview

Program output at startup

Figure 1 shows the screen output of both programs at startup.

Program output at startup.

Program output at startup.
Program output at startup.

A common custom effect

Both programs apply the same custom effect to both buttons. However, the program named CustomEffect02 applies the effect in such a way that it is played on both buttons simultaneously if either button is clicked.The program named CustomEffect03 applies the custom effect in such a way that it plays individually on each button when the button is clicked.I will explain the reason for this difference later.

One run is worth a thousand pictures

Hopefully by now you have been able to run the online version of both programs because the effect is difficult to explain.Basically, the custom effect consists of the parallel execution of three types of standard ActionScript effects:

  • WipeRight
  • Glow
  • Rotate

The effect appears to cause the buttons to leave their positions, change color, and fly around for a short while before settling back into their normalpositions.

CustomEffect02 output after clicking a button

Figure 2 shows the output from the program named CustomEffect02 shortly after clicking one of the buttons.

Customeffect02 output after clicking a button.

CustomEffect02 output after clicking a button.
CustomEffect02 output after clicking a button.

Discussion and sample code

Will discuss in fragments

I will discuss and explain these two programs in fragments. Complete listings of the MXML code and theActionScript code are provided near the end of the lesson beginning with Listing 18.

The MXML files

Both programs use the same simple MXML code shown in Listing 1.

Common mxml code.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><!--CustomEffect02 11/26/09 Illustrates a custom effect, which is the parallelplaying of three standard effects: WipeRightRotate GlowThe effect is applied to two buttons each time either button is clicked.This version sets the targets on the effect and calls the play method on the effect.See the Flex 3 Cookbook, page 363 Also see http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=createeffects_2.html#178126 Also see http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=behaviors_04.html#275399 --><mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"xmlns:cc="CustomClasses.*"><cc:Driver/></mx:Application>

An object of the class named Driver

As you can see, this MXML file simply instantiates an object of the class named Driver . That's because almost all of the code in these two programs is written in ActionScript instead of MXML.

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Source:  OpenStax, Object-oriented programming (oop) with actionscript. OpenStax CNX. Jun 04, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11202/1.19
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