Flash 8 Cookbook

Chapter 16. Loading Images and Flash Content

Typically your first Flash applications are likely to be fairly small in scope. But the scope of projects will grow as your skill set grows, and then it becomes important to take into consideration how you can best manage the content. This chapter explains how to load content and even how to share common content amongst multiple files. There are several primary benefits from these processes:

Loading content means better manageability

There are plenty of examples that illustrate this point. Consider an example of a gallery of animations. When the gallery contains one or two animations, it is reasonable to manage whilst all the content is within a single file. But as the number of animations grows, it becomes less and less reasonable to have them all contained within a single file. Each time you want to add a new animation you have to open the same .fla file and add new content. That process would not only be unmanageable for a single person, but is notably less manageable for a team of people. Instead, a much more feasible solution is to have a single file that displays the animations while each animation is its own file.

Loading external content makes it much simpler to use dynamic content

For example, if you have a Flash application that allows the user to search and view products, you may want to consider loading the product images from external .jpg files rather than embedding them in the .swf file. This has several advantages. If ...