Flash 8 Cookbook

16.5. Hiding a Progress Bar When Content Has Loaded

Problem

You want to determine when content has completed loading so that you can tell Flash to hide the progress bar.

Solution

If you are using the Flash 8 Cookbook ProgressBar, set the autoHide parameter to true.

Otherwise, if you are using the Macromedia v2 ProgressBar, add a listener object, and when the complete( ) method is called, have Flash set the ProgressBar instance’s visible property to false.

Alternatively, if you are using a custom load indicator as discussed at the end of Recipe 16.4, add a listener object to the MovieClipLoader object, and when the onLoadInit( ) method is called, have Flash set the movie clip and/or text field’s _visible property to false.

Discussion

Typically, when content has completed loading, you will want to hide the ProgressBar or other graphical indicator that you have used to display the load progress to the user. If you are using the Flash 8 Cookbook ProgressBar, all you need to do is set the autoHide parameter to true. Then, when the percent loaded has reached 100%, the instance will automatically hide.

If you are using the Macromedia v2 ProgressBar, your job is a little more complex. In order to accomplish this task, you’ll need to use a little bit of ActionScript. But you needn’t worry: the ActionScript is fairly short and simple.

If you want to hide a ProgressBar component instance after the content has loaded, complete the following steps:

1. Create an event listener object. As with the other types ...