Building Data-Driven Flash Movies - No News Is Good News (
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Now, you can
develop some pretty cool applications with power like this...and one of the
coolest (and easiest) is a dynamic news ticker, updated from a MySQL database.
Let's see how.
First, pop open a new Flash movie and create a dynamic
text box symbol, in the manner described on the previous page. Call it "ticker",
and name the variable which will contain the data for the text box
"content".
Format
the appearance of the text box, by adjusting the values in the Window ->
Panels -> Text Options and Window -> Panels -> Character dialog boxes.
I used a white Arial font, size 12, right-aligned.
Next,
we need to create a motion tween to move the text box horizontally across the
bottom of the movie. Insert an instance of the newly-minted "ticker" symbol into
your movie clip, outside the lower right edge of your movie clip.
Insert
a new keyframe in your timeline somewhere around frame 40, and move the symbol
instance all the way across to the other edge of the movie clip.
Right-click
anywhere between the two keyframes in the timeline and insert a motion
tween.
Test
your movie. You should see the symbol instance float horizontally across the
bottom of the screen.
Of course, it doesn't contain anything yet - which makes it
fairly useless. Let's rectify that next. Right-click the first keyframe and
insert some ActionScript.
This tells Flash to load variables generated by the
server-side script "ticker.php" into the movie, and use them wherever required.
Let's look at that script next.
