Chapter 10. Making Up for a Reduced Component Set

In spite of the component improvements discussed in Chapter 9, the overall number of components in the Flash authoring tool has been reduced for ActionScript 3.0 FLA files. The data components, in particular, have been removed completely and now belong to the Flex framework. A handful of user interface (UI) components, such as Accordion, Tree, and Window, are also absent.

Note

See Table 9-2 through Table 9-5 in Chapter 9 for a full list of new and removed components.

These components are still available for ActionScript 2.0 documents, but the Components panel adjusts its contents based on a FLA file’s publish settings (File→Publish Settings→Flash→Script). Even if you start in an ActionScript 2.0 document, and then add components to the Library panel and change your publish settings, you will only see error messages when you compile. Components designed for different versions of ActionScript can’t be mixed in the same FLA file. This chapter discusses a number of ways to work around (or work without) Flash components no longer supported in ActionScript 3.0.

Working Without Data Components in ActionScript 3.0

The data components in ActionScript 2.0 offered a panel-based interface for configuring sophisticated data interactions among UI components and even external data sources, such as XML documents and databases. In a sense, they provided a more complex, but similar apparatus to the Script Assist feature of the Actions panel, best suited ...

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