ActionScript 3.0 Bible

Chapter 16. Working with DisplayObjects in Flash Professional

Despite ActionScript 3.0's formidable display list and drawing capabilities, drawing all your application's graphics from scratch using code is far too tedious to be practical. Likewise, loading graphics from many external files can be difficult to manage and may be more trouble than it's worth. In fact, in most production work, developers use Flash Professional's layout, compositing, animation, and drawing tools to prepare assets for use with ActionScript.

In this chapter, you'll learn how Flash Professional works with DisplayObjects and how to effectively use embedded and dynamically loaded assets produced in Flash Professional.

The Stage, Symbols, and the Library

Although it may have some extra features, Flash Professional uses the same display list model that you learned about in Chapter 14, "Visual Programming with the Display List." The stage that you see in Flash Professional is the same stage in Flash Player. Anything you can put on the stage in Flash Professional is a DisplayObject, and when you run the program, it appears on stage. Simply, Flash Professional acts as a visual editor for the display list.

If you've used Flash Professional, you should be comfortable with symbols, which are reusable piece of graphics, sound, or animation. You can repeat the same symbol multiple times. Think of symbols as classes. The symbol's definition in Flash's Library is the class, and symbol instances on stage are instances. Placing ...