Adobe® Flash® CS3 Professional Bible

Chapter 35. Binding Data and Events to AS2 Components

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Defining data binding

• Using the visual data binding features of Flash CS3

• Binding data between the XMLConnector component and the List component

• Creating a list of cue points for the FLVPlayback component

• Adding a DataGrid component programmatically at runtime

In the last chapter, you learned how to use many of the User Interface components in a Flash movie. Components enable you to create Rich Internet Applications (or RIAs) within a Web browser that work very much like applications you run on your desktop. In this chapter, you learn how to expand the potential of components by integrating data providers and event handling.

Warning

This chapter's content applies only to ActionScript 2.0 components. The new ActionScript 3.0 components cannot use the data binding features of the Component Inspector panel.

What Is Data Binding?

You may often hear the term data binding associated with discussions of Flash components. Data binding is the process of taking information and adding it to a component, to display the information or to manipulate the data in a meaningful way. Any information that you bind to a component is often called a data provider. Data providers can be very simple, such as a String value (for example, a heading at the top of a movie with the text "Welcome to the Site"), or very complicated, such as a RecordSet object or an Array value (for example, a list of employees in your company, complete with first and ...