Target Menu Items in ActionScript

I don’t often post Actionscript code because it often falls under the “wise men don’t need it, fools won’t heed it” principle (I might be the fool, who knows), but this little bit of code is something that I happen to use fairly often in projects where I want to highlight particular menu items.

Part of the inspiration in posting this is that I’ve recently been going through a previous developer’s code where they tell all of their menu items to do one thing, then single out the selected item to do the opposite afterwards. Instead of explicitly targeting menu items to do things, it’s much cleaner to create an array of the items, make a temporary array of that list, and then target them.

// set up an array of menu items
private var menuArray:Array = new Array(mc1, mc2, mc3);

private function rollOut(id:Number):Void{
// create a temporary array based on menuArray so that we don’t damage the original
var tempArray:Array = menuArray.slice();
// now, pull the menu item we don’t want to affect
tempArray.splice(id, 1);
var len:Number = tempArray.length;
// loop through remaining menu items
for(var i:Number = 0; i
// perform menu item(s) transition here
tempArray[i].doSomething();
}
}

Hopefully this helps someone out there, and if anyone has a recommendation to make it cleaner, I’d love to hear from you.

getURL() locally on CD-ROM with Flash Projector

I recently ran into a quite a bugger while transferring a Flash projector to a CD-ROM. Just like authoring an SWF, I used getURL() to call some local HTML files and a PowerPoint–with no problem running off my hard drive. When I transferred all of these files to a CD-ROM, though, all of the local links got lost. They all started dropping the parent path directory (in this case, the name of the CD and/or drive name). For instance:

file:///Volumes/resources/image_gallery/index.htm

Came out as this:

file:///resources/image_gallery/index.htm

I looked into using an fscommand, but that’s a dead end because it’ll only launch a program and not open a particular file. The real problem? It appears that if you have overrided the default browser on your computer, Flash drops the path. In my case, I have Firefox set on both my Mac and PC. The solution? After searching all over the Web, I came across this script (which I’ve strictly-typed for class use):

/**
* Corrects issue where projector wants default system browser to open local URL.
* @param path String to local file
*/
function buildLink(path:String):Void{
var poslastslash:Number = timeline._url.lastIndexOf(“\\”);
if (poslastslash == -1) {
poslastslash = timeline._url.lastIndexOf(“/”);
}
var folderurl:String = timeline._url.substr(0, poslastslash+1);
var poscolon:Number = folderurl.indexOf(“|”);
if (poscolon<>-1) {
var folderurlstart:String = folderurl.substr(0, poscolon);
var folderurlend:String = folderurl.substr(poscolon+1);
folderurl = folderurlstart+”:”+folderurlend;
}
var targeturl:String = folderurl + path;
getURL(targeturl, “_blank”);
}

Thank you OttoM, whomever you are.

I’m posting this because of how remote the documentation was for me when searching for the problem. Hopefully, it’ll help someone else out.