by
senocular
Introduction
Virtually every Flash web site ever created has a menu
of some sort in it. Most are quite simple, possibly just
a row of buttons. Others, however, are more complex,
offering not just buttons but also incorporating
submenus via drop-down as well. That's what this
tutorial will focus on, a drop-down menu. But not any
drop-down menu. No. The menu created here will be driven
by one (or more) external XML files which, when read
into Flash, will determine the makeup and behavior of
that menu. Something like the following.
[ menu
in Flash defined with XML ]
Deciding on XML
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a prime candidate
for defining drop down menus of this sort because the
nature of the organization of XML is defined in the same
way as the drop-down menu itself. Both are organized in
a hierarchical manner where you have a base collection
of items which then can contain further collections of
more items or more collections. Consider the following
XML snippet. Can you imagine what this might like as a
real functioning menu?
- <?xml version="1.0"?>
- <mainmenu>
- <home/>
- <portfolio/>
- <contact/>
- <friends>
- <joe/>
- <karen/>
- <bob/>
- </friends>
- </mainmenu>
The mainmenu here represents, obviously, the main
menu portion of this menu design. Under that XML are the
primary menu options. These options include home,
portfolio, contact and friends. The friends element (or
node) here, however, as you can see, contains more nodes
of its own. It has contained within it another menu.
This makes friends a submenu of the main menu. The final
result would look something like this.
[
working mainmenu example ]
With XML you have, basically, a text version of your
menu to define it. This makes it well organized and easy
to interpret. But probably more importantly is its
potential for customization and ease when changing or
updating. By having your Flash menu defined by an
external text-based XML file, you can change its options
and its behavior easily without ever having to open
Flash!
Goals
This tutorial is presented with the following goals:
-
Create a menu in Flash.
-
Allow for menu items to open up further submenus.
-
Generate the menu based an external XML document.
-
Allow for complete customization of the menu through
the XML definition. This includes the options to
customize:
- The layout of the menu.
- The names of each individual menu items.
- Whether or not a menu item is a simple menu item
or if it opens up another submenu.
- Actions associated with the pressing of any menu
item.
-
Allow for a dynamic restructuring of the menu simply
by loading in a new XML definition.