XML Flash Site Templates: Accessing symbols using the library.

The year was 1985 Saturn makes its national deybute as ” A Different Kind of Car Company” (that’s a laugh!), MacGyver premieres on ABC, and the first film in Steven Spielberg’s “Back To The Future” trilogy profitably brands Marty McFly as a household name. Marty is an average 80’s teenager, except for one problem. He is stuck in 1955. Now, the only other way to get back is to generate 1.21 gigawatts of electricity, but the only source strong enough to generate that kind of power is a bolt of lightning; unfortunately it’s impossible to determine when and where they will strike.

Our topic here is accessing symbols in XML Flash Templates, which is rather like being stuck in 1955 trying to jumpstart a DeLorean. Sure, there are geeks who can do XML, and there are frilly frou frou types that are great at Flash. But an artist writing XML? Or a coder doing Flash movies? Wouldn’t this kind of crossover require a flux capacitor and run the risk of a major disruption to the space-time continuum? Apparently not. In the previous articles (XML Flash Templates - Maintaining your Flash website made simple!) I introduced you to XML Flash Site templates a new product category with a unique feature allowing content to be loaded onto Flash via an XML file.

Basically, what this does is grant anyone the simplicity of editing the Flash template’s content from a text editor, and still keep the performance and beauty of Flash intact. Notwithstanding, what if I needed to access the elements (or “symbols” sometimes these two words may be used interchangeably) within the Flash Template itself (e.g. the frilly frou frou)?
There are three different ways you can do this you can “A” double click the symbol on the stage to edit it in place, “B” select an instance of the symbol on the Stage and right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh), and select Edit in Place or “C” which in my opinion is the safest and easiest way to access Flash elements and that is through the symbols library. You can launch it using Ctrl+L hotkey or by selecting Library from the Windows menu. Note directions apply to both XML Flash templates and all other Flash template types.

The Library contains all bitmaps, sound and movie clip symbols used in the Flash template. To make the customizations of our XML Flash template easier for our customers we have allocated all symbols in individual folders with appropriate names. For example jpeg and or png files would be within a folder named “bitmaps”. Likewise, you will find a “buttons” folder also for buttons symbols and so forth.

As you browse through the symbols library you will be able to see the content of each symbols in the preview area, however if nothing shows in the preview area it means that the symbols color is the same as the background color. For example you would not expect to see white text on white background. You can easily remedy this by momentarily changing the movie background color. Press Ctrl+J hotkey to open Movie Properties window, and select a lighter or darker shade of color.

In some cases you might also want to duplicate a symbol. The menu, for example, may have a total of 5 main navigation items and you desire to add one more (i.e. you wish to include a FAQ page); from the symbols library, what we need to do is right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh) the symbol, select Duplicate Symbol and give the duplicate symbol it’s name. Next, drag the symbol unto the stage and give it an instance name. Note an instance name and a symbol name are tow totally different things. Meaning, that while there may be two or more instances of the same symbol with the same name “symbol 1”, each instance must have assigned a unique identifier (e.g. instance name) for all ActionScrip reference purposes.
To edit the symbol, you simply double click the symbol to access it in the Main Area. Then double click the text area and enter your own slogan. Once you edit a symbol, Flash updates all the instances of that symbol in your document. You can customize all other Flash elements by repeating these simple steps.

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