Question

I am trying to build a custom modal dialog in flash. The way I chose to go about it is create a movie clip class with the UI for the dialog with a function to add buttons to it. I then size the ui after all the buttons are added and display it on the screen.

It works up to this point. Now I want whatever called this dialog to wait until a button is picked before the user can do anything else. Something along the lines of:

var dialog:MyDialog = new MyDialog();
dialog.addButton(new MyButton("Foo"));
dialog.addButton(new MyButton("Bar"));
var result:String = dialog.show(); // we will wait here

In the dialog.show I wish to show the movie clip and then wait for the user to click and of the buttons on the dialog before returning. The MouseEvent.CLICK event is asynchronous though so I don’t know how to wait for it.

An alternative is creating a whole custom complete event for the dialog that is added to the screen that is calling the dialog which I can continue the logic in and have a boolean that disables other input, but that is a pretty big hassle and I’ve never done anything like it.

Answer 1

What your describing is a misconception of what synchronous and asynchronous is.

When the dialog comes up, you still want the user to be able to hit the dialog button. If the procedure was synchronous then the entire program would freeze as the routines for the mouse clicking actions would never arrive. Remember, flash is single threaded.

The thread that has the popup is sharing the same thread as the underlying app.

The easiest thing is just to have an event on the buttons that dispatch some close event that you can listen for in your application. No custom event classes are needed.

dispatchEvent(new Event("close"))

as an example.

If your worried about the user interacting with parts outside of the application, then you can simply draw a rectangle behind the popup with mouseEnabled true, or check out using Flex’s model dialog classes.