Question

I’m doing a project using ActionScript 2 where I’m loading in text from an XML file to dynamic text boxes. I’m loading everything in on the first frame, but there are boxes that do not exist in the timeline until frame 5 or so. Is there anyway I can access those to set their text property from the first frame?? Thanks!

Answer 1

Quick and dirty answer:

If you know exactly which frame the text boxes appear on, you can use this procedure to populate their text as soon as they’re available:
1. Set their visibility to false in Flash
2. In an action keyframe on the same frame number when the text field appears, apply the value to the newly instanced text field
3. In the same action keyframe, set their visibility to true. This will avoid flicker as text will already be populated when they become visible.

If you were using AS3, I’d suggest the OOP answer instead:

1. Write a function that listens for ADDED events and add the handler function to the stage in the first frame. As new items are added on the stage they will bubble up and be caught by this handler
2. In the handler function inspect the target of the event; if it is a textField and is named after one of the text fields you are interested in, apply the cached value from your loaded XML file

In our dev team we use the latter approach all the time. Works like a charm.