drop down menu over top of html

[derek lapp]

the image explains it best:

http://www.vectorthis.com/42/menu.jpg

i have a 40px menu bar. the menu is going to be in flash, and have drop downs and i need the drop downs to extend beyond the 40px of the green bar, over top of html (and SiFR) content.

i'm pretty sure this is an embedding and/or issue. if i set the movie height in flash to 300px, setting the height to 300 when i embed it will force all the html content down 260px and make a huge gap od white space. if i assign the heights to 40 in flash and when i embed it, i'm pretty sure it'll just cut everything off at 40.

any help?

[SlowRoasted]

I tried this a while back and couldn't get it to work. You will have to put the flash in a div and apple the css to the div "position:absolute;". If you have any other absolute positioning going on, then you need to make sure the z-index of the flash div is the highest. The problem that occurs is that you can't access the html below the flash when it is floating on top. What I did was call a javascript function when the flash menu dropped down that extended the div and the flash so that the dropdown menu would show. It was really buggy, and I gave up after a while. I'm not saying it's not possible, It just really feels like you are jerry rigging an old car to make one last trip to the store:P

[derek lapp]

well i'm doing flash work for a buddy of mine, and he's turned to flash as a last resort. trying this impedes on the design the least, but we're not ready to remake the wheel for the simple aesthetics of dropping down.

it looks like i have these options:

1. make my flash movie fullsize, set the height in swfobject to 40px, set scale to no, or do whatever you do to get 100% fluid flash sites, then onRollover, call a js function that sets #flashMenu height to whatever i need, and run the green stripe as a bg image so the content shows through. not being able to select the text is fine for me, because onRollOut i just pass another boolean to the JS that will reset the div height to 40, so by the time they're ready to select, it's not overlapping again.

2. make the drop down go up instead, into the flash header - probably by just loading the swf into a container movie clip inside menu and make the search form inside flash too.

at first my buddy was trying to set up a css menu, but the titles are done in SiFR and it was taking priority over the css dropdown. the usual fix for that is setting mode to transparent/opaque, but with SiFR i have no idea how to do that, so he's ready to give up and do a flash menu.

tomorrow i want to try a test run of the flash/js method just to see how painful it can get. my only real question is, in flash should i set the canvase to 40px and have the dropdown runn off, or should i make the canvase the 300-400 pic i might need?