Before we go too far we should give an overview of what the text file
will consist of and some options which are used inside of the file:
& - says that
the next word is a variable name.
= - says that the following characters is to be read into the movie
until it reaches the next ampersand (&).
%0D - is url-form code (a standard format used by server-side
scripts) for a carriage return. You can't just use enter to seperate
lines unless you want a blank line every second line.
&textloaded=OK - is going to tell Flash that the text
file is loaded.
For this example the ‘location.txt’ file contains the
following information:
&Name=Shawn Ryder
&City=Lower Sackville
&Province=Nova Scotia
&Country=Canada &textloaded=OK
Basically, what this does is show the variables of my name,
city, province and country that I live. This is quite easy and straight
forward, also allowing for easy updating of the content.
We want to add the following:
Frame 1 loadVariablesNum ("location.txt", 0);
Frame 2 if (/:textloaded="OK") {
gotoAndPlay (4); }
Frame 3
Go to and Play (2)
As you can see the first frame uses ‘Load Variables’ script to call
upon the text file that we created with the information. In the very
next keyframe we used the If statement to see if the text file has
successful loaded and move ahead once done – by using the goto and play
script to move ahead to frame 4 and basically skip over the 3rd
frame. If it hasn’t loaded at that point it goes to frame 3 which will
simply go back to frame 2 and loop until completely loaded. Remember
to insert keyframes in a scene, all that is required is to hit F6 on
the keyboard and it gives you the ability to add some actions to that
frame.
Now, once we have the text loaded into the file we obviously need to
display this in some way to the users of the site. This is where we
need to create some textboxes inside of Flash that can be assigned
variables used to display the text. This is quite straight
forward, but we will certainly run through the steps to set them up.
The first thing that we want to do is use the text tool to draw a text
box in which the text will be displayed. Since the variable values are
simply a line of text, these boxes only need to be one line and perhaps
big enough to hold about a hundred characters at the very most! With
the box created we now need to make some changes to the ‘text options’
in order to view the variables we have brought into the file. The first
thing that we want to do is select the drop down menu and choose
‘Dynamic Text’ from this menu – this simply says that the text is
going to be brought in dynamically. In the next drop down we can
select either ‘Single Line’ or ‘Multiline’ and for this
example we are going to just have one line of text so choose the
Single Line option. Then in the variable box we put in the
corresponding name for the variable we used in the text file. There
are a couple of other options in the box including HTML (more
about this in a minute), Border and Selectable. The only one we have
selected is the border option so that there is a border seen around
the text box field. This can be easily turned off if you don’t want
the box to be seen and the selectable can be turn on if you want the
user to be able to highlight the text in the box and in turn be able
to copy it if they would like. Once you export the movie, you will
need to make sure that the text file is in the same directory as the
final movie. Look at the web page that is created and you will notice
that the text is now brought in dynamically through the text file!
Edit the variables inside the text file and refresh the web page to
see what happens!
