IFBIN - Great Software By Example

MovieClips in Flash® Player 8 support a new property called scrollRect. When set to an instance of a flash.geom.Rectangle class, it sizes the clip for scrolling and masks content outside the scrollRect boundaries. The example requires Flash® 8 Beta Player.


One of Turkey's Amazing Beaches. Drag the image around.

First off, scrollRect might be one of my favorite features in Flash® 8. It solves so many issues with using MovieClips as containers. The scrollRect property allows you to set the visible area of a MovieClip by assigning a flash.geom.Rectangle instance. The Rectangle is set as follows:

mc.scrollRect = new flash.geom.Rectangle(0,0,100,100)

The arguments are xOffset, yOffset, Width, and Height. Starting at the 0,0 orgin of the MovieClip, the above code will create a rectangle from 0,0 to 100,100. If I did this:

mc.scrollRect = new flash.geom.Rectangle(20,30,100,100)

the rectangle created would cover from 20,30 to 120,130 of the target MovieClip. Remember the last two arguments are not coordinates but width and height. This is a very easy mistake to make and the new Rectangle Class is used with a lot of the new features. Put this in your back pocket, you will need it later on, trust me.

In the example the dragging of the clip is an illusion. I am actually setting the scrollRect value as you drag the mouse around. In this case I have not changed the _x, _y of the clip but rather modified the scrollRect to look like I did. This is extremely useful for container creation and makes masking or scrolling content much simpler. As a technique, it is orthogonal and allows you to manipulate the view without requiring nested MovieClips or many of the old school techniques. It is a revolution in how you can manipulate content visually.

Remember scrollRect, it is your new best friend when manipulating a container's view. This example will ship with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.


More to come,

Ted ;)