Actionscript Cookbook

The Code

This book contains a lot of ActionScript (or more colloquially, code). Many recipes offer suggested custom classes and custom methods for built-in ActionScript classes that I have found to be invaluable. I trust you will find them useful as well. I also recommend that you organize these classes and methods into ActionScript library files that you can save to your Flash Include directory so you can include them in your Flash movies with relative ease. (The Include folder is a special subdirectory under the Flash installation directory in which Flash automatically looks for included files. You may need to create this subdirectory manually.) You can skip or ignore these custom classes and methods if you don’t think they are relevant to the kind of applications you build. Alternatively, you can enter the code from this book into your own ActionScript libraries; going through the code line by line will deepen your understanding of how it works.

Tip

To save time or avoid errors when hand-entering the code, you can download the complete ActionScript libraries from http://www.person13.com/ascb. However, some library files, such as RecordSet.as and DataGlue.as must be downloaded from Macromedia’s web site as part of the Flash Remoting Components, available at http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashremoting/downloads/components.

In addition to the ActionScript libraries, there are also some other important code examples within the recipes, such as custom components and server-side scripts (ASP.NET, CFML, etc.). The corresponding Flash documents and scripts are also available for download at the same web site. The complete applications from Part III are available for download as well. To successfully use the Flash applications from Part III, you must also have downloaded the necessary ActionScript libraries from Part I and Part II.