Actionscript Cookbook

7.3. Affecting Playback

Problem

You want to control the playhead of a movie clip’s timeline.

Solution

Use the global functions and movie clip methods that control the playhead.

Discussion

You can use the timeline-affecting methods, shown in Table 7-1, to control the playback of a movie clip. These methods are most meaningful for movie clips that have more than one frame in their timelines. Therefore, movie clips created using the createEmptyMovieClip( ) method cannot be usefully affected by the timeline-affecting methods because they have only one frame, and there is no way to programmatically add more frames.

Table 7-1. The timeline-affecting methods

Method	Description
play( )	Plays the movie clip’s timeline from the current frame. If the timeline is already playing, this has no effect.
stop( )	Stops the movie clip’s timeline at the current frame. If the timeline is already stopped, this has no effect. Flash continues to render the Stage and process events even when a clip is stopped.
gotoAndPlay( )	Plays the timeline from a particular frame regardless of the current frame. The frame can be specified as a frame number or a frame label.
gotoAndStop( )	Moves the playhead to a particular frame and stops the play head. The frame can be specified as a frame number or a frame label.
nextFrame( )	Moves the playhead to the frame after the current frame and stops the play head.
prevFrame( )	Moves the playhead to the frame just before the current frame and stops ...