Comments on: How to Trigger ActionScript with Text Field Hyperlinks (AS2)

by: David Stiller

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 02:57:41 +0000

mike,

I have toyed with that tag idea a bit, actually. It’s been tough so far, because the tag in Flash seems to force a line break after itself. Not sure this is a usable approach, after all … but if I do figure something out, I’ll be sure to blog about it!

by: mike

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:21:01 +0000

have you toyed with that tag solution yet? i’m lacking a little knowledge on that techinique and could use some insight into how to do it.

by: David Stiller

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:54:22 +0000

Jase, For better or worse, hyperlinks in Flash's version of HTML only respond to the equivalent of a Button.onRelease event. It's possible to style hyperlinks with CSS, so that they visually respond to rollovers, but those "quasi-event handlers" can't be tasked with actually doing anything. Several months ago, I read an entry in the Adobe ActionScript forum (by kglad, I think) that suggested using movie clips in place of the hyperlinked words. That is, when you would normally have entered an <a> tag, use an <img> tag instead, and set the src attribute of that tag to the Linkage identifier of a movie clip in your Library. That movie clip would simply be a symbol that wraps a very small text field with the desired word. An id attribute in the same <img> tag will allow you to assign an instance name to the movie clip in question. I haven't toyed with the concept myself, but it's probably worth a shot.

by: Jase

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:22:35 +0000

Any idea about how this could be used with rollover events in text. I would like to be able to dynamically size my textfield which contains a bunch of words that when moused over should pop-up a MovieClip. Right now I place invisible buttons behind the text, but there has got a be a better way.

Any advice would be great. Thanks.

jase

by: David Stiller

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 14:03:23 +0000

Glad to hear it, Toby!

by: Toby Miller

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 13:39:29 +0000

This is great, I really appreciate the article … it saved my ass this morning. =)

by: David Stiller

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 17:46:16 +0000

Good thinking, NSurveyor! It’s funny, as soon as I published that one, the String.split() method occurred to me. But I didn’t log back in to update the article. Glad you posted your thoughts. Some of my best insights come to me when I finally stop thinking about it.

by: NSurveyor

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 23:12:52 +0000

When I use it and I need multiple parameters, I would define a custom function that would split the only parameter on commas, giving me essentially my arguments in an array. For example:

function makeSomethingHappen(info:String) {
  var args = info.split(',');
  var what:String = args[0];
  var when:Date = new Date(Number(args[1]));
  var where:MovieClip = eval(args[2]);
  if (new Date()>when) {
    where[what]();
  }	
}
stop();

"asfunction:makeSomethingHappen,play,234,_root"

will make the root play when you click on it, because 234 represents Dec 31, 1969, which has alrady passed.

"asfunction:makeSomethingHappen,play,2151190071921,_root"

will NOT make the root play when you click on it, because 2151190071921 represents Mar 2, 2038 which has not occurred yet. Though this doesn't work well when one of your "parameters" is a string with commas in it... I guess you could choose another character for the delimeter. Also, you can use asfunction in a textfile, and then load it into a html enabled textfield. Something like:

<a href="_root.unloadMovie" rel="nofollow">Bye bye!</a>

inside the text doc, myText.txt Then in flash, something like:

my_lv = new LoadVars();
my_lv.onData = function(r){
my_txt.html = true;
my_txt.htmlText = r;
}
my_lv.load("myText.txt");