Set Property
Excerpted from Actionscript.org
All objects in space have attributes or properties: such as width, height, position,
color, etc. Flash is no different, all visual elements within your flash movie
have properties. Often it is beneficial to us if we can set the values of such
properties, and Actionscript allows for this beautifully.
Take the Set Properties document as an example. Using Set Property we can make
our object fat/skinny, transparent, upside-down (rotated), invisible...
Usage of Set Property takes the following basic form (I have updated this code
but this is how they explain it):
setProperty ( target, property, value);
Where target is the instance name of the object within the Flash movie which
we are interested in examining, property indicates the property we wish to set
and value is the value we wish to set it to. The target is generally the path
to a movie clip. The value is almost always a number, in expression form, not
a String. I say again, not a string - don't use quotes around numbers!
This list outlines the code you can substitute in for the property attribute,
and what it will get you.
setProperty ( target, _x , value);
The X axis position (in pixels) of the target clip. value should be a number;
no quotes!
setProperty ( target, _y , value);
The Y axis position (in pixels) of the target clip. value should be a number;
no quotes!
setProperty ( target, _width, value);
The width (in pixels) of the target clip. value should be a number; no quotes!
setProperty ( target, _height, value);
The height (in pixels) of the target clip. value should be a number; no quotes!
setProperty ( target, _rotation, value);
The rotation angle (in degrees, -360 through 360) of the target clip. value
should be a number; no quotes!
setProperty ( target, _name, value);
The instance name of the target clip.
setProperty ( target, _xscale, value);
The X scale proportion relative to the original clip size, (in percent) of the
target clip. value should be a number; no quotes!
setProperty ( target, _yscale, value);
The Y scale proportion relative to the original clip size, (in percent) of the
target clip. value should be a number; no quotes!
setProperty ( target, _alpha, value);
The alpha fade level (in percent) of the target clip. value should be a number;
no quotes!
setProperty ( target, _visible, value);
The visibility status (true (1) or false (0)) of the target clip.
If you open up the example clip above and view the source on each button you
will see it is something like this:
on (release) {
setProperty ("_level0.mouse", _x, xpos);
}
Ignoring the button part of this (the 'on' command) the important line is the
second line which gives an example of the usage of Set Property.
_level0.mouse is the full path to my mouse movie clip (which I named 'mouse'
using the Instance inspector) and is enclosed in quotes because it's a path
to a target.
_x means I'm wanting to set the X position of the object. xpos is a variable
(which the user enters in the text field next to the button). Note that xpos
has no quotes around it because I want to set the property to the value within
the xpos variable (in this case, the text field).
Finally, Flash 5 (and above) supports infix Set Property notation. The benefit
of this is that it is shorter to code and easier to read most of the time. When
using infix notation you simply enter the path to the object followed by a dot
and then the property you wish to examine.
So if I want to set the width of a clip with instance name "John"
on the main timeline (_root) to 100 pixels I can enter:
setProperty ( "_root.John", _width, 100);
// OR I suggest
_root.John._width = 100;
In the document I gave you I used:on (release) {
mouse._x = xpos;
}
Where xpos is the name of the dynamic text box. The user then enters their data
and this is used to calculate the x position of my object mouse.