How not to hate Components So Much
The following is a collection of tutorials about working with tutorials and minimizing the typical frustration that occurs when you want to extend or alter it’s functionality in any way.
Firstly I quite like the idea of components, pre-compiled movieClips and Actionscript with nice property panels sounds good and I can see the benefit. The difficulty occurs as soon as soon as you need to apply some custom functionality. I have never used a component without needing some custom functionality. For example I was displaying message posts in a ScrollPane. However I didn’t want a horizontal scrollbar available there was no option to simple switch this off. Another time a text area needed to be given an inactive state but you aren’t able to include the inactive state in the components skin.
To overcome the above problems I needed to extend the Components class. I have already posted a tutorial on extending the BitCompoments the Macromedia components are easier though as at least you get the Actionscript code for the components.
Another frustration using Components is if you use MTASC to compile your SWF files. Sadly the classes used in the component are not available to compiler so it fails. If you use ANT files to compile you SWF files you can get around this by recreating the classes in a different class path. It’s important for the class to have the correct package but different class path to what the actual SWF file uses to avoid the fake class paths to overwrite the component classes.
’’‘Top Hates’’’- Can’t check up the code
- Can’t reduce the code
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If anything is unclear or just plain wrong let us know and should ammend it pretty sharpish. If you visited the page with a particular question leave it and if it's flash related I'll try to answer it.