I will now provide a quick summary of everything in our
thumbnail code, from the previous
pages, and what causes it to work.
First, you decide that you want to have thumbnails. You make the
necessary modifications to the XML file by adding in the path
for your thumbnail images. Now that you have your XML file modified,
your next course of action is to modify the loadXML function in
your FLA. You tell Flash to loop through each node and pick out
the thumbnail image path and store it in an array.
So, now, you have reached a point where data from XML has been
retrieved, processed, and stored as an array in Flash. What do
you do with an array full of thumbnail image paths? You create
an empty movie clip for each thumbnail and load that thumbnail
into it!
Loading the thumbnail is only one part of our whole thumbnail
scroller. You have to make sure that each image is spaced
accordingly by taking into account each image's width and not
loading the next successive image on top of a previous image!
That is where our hit_left and hit_right movie clips first gain
importance.
The second part of the thumbnail scroller is to actually
scroll when our mouse is on the left or right edges of our
thumbnail. In this tutorial, I used the two movie clips, hit_left
and hit_right to simulate the left and right boundaries of our
thumbnail scroller. If the mouse was both within the thumbnail
area and touching either the left or right hit movie clips, your
thumbnails will scroll provided there are thumbnails left to
scroll.
Since most of the code is based on the existing photo gallery
code, it was not difficult to load the larger image when a
thumbnail is clicked. Each thumbnail contained a number that was
equivalent to a number used in loading images in the photo
gallery. Passing that number to our existing functions from our
photo gallery was all it took to getting images to load.
I have provided a ZIP file containing both our final
thumbnail FLA and the modified images.xml file.
A great big thanks go out to all of the members who
constantly helped others with their thumbnail and photo
gallery questions on the forums. I'm sure there are more
members, but the ones I've seen helping answer these
questions often are scotty, stringy, senocular,
lostinbeta, claudio, and more!
Just a final word before we wrap up. If you have a question and/or want to be part of a friendly, collaborative community of over 220k other developers like yourself, post on the forums for a quick response!

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