Flash, ahhh, he'll doom every one of us

September 21, 2011 7:46 PM

I need some help getting a Flash rollover to behave.

OK, so I've become the Flash expert at work. Yay me! Except I am not anything near an expert and I'm in this position because they laid off the real experts. I have designed a Flash CS3 Actionscript 2.0 file which *almost* works. The file starts out as a standard 728x90 leaderboard. When the user mouses over it, it pops out to a 728x180 box. The start-up graphic has a button on it. On rollover, it calls a javascript on our website that provides a 180 px deep container for it to show, and the file expands to 180 px. On mouseout, it calls another javascript to collapse the container back to 90 px deep, and it reverts back to a standard leaderboard size. So far, everything works nice.

After the first rollover, it gets a little dicey. So we're back to the unexpanded state. If I go to mouseover again, it calls the javascript and provides the 180 px container again (I can see this happen in Firebug.) But the file doesn't expand. If I mouse back out, and then rollover again, the file expands like it normally should. I have removed the script calls from the Flash file and checked it; it's definitely a problem with the file and not the website or script because it does the exact same thing.

Is there something I need to do in the FLA to reset the rollover to its original state aside from simply redirecting the file back to the start? (I don't have the FLA; it's at work, but I can get it tomorrow.) Let me know what other info to provide, unless there's something painfully obvious I'm missing.

posted by azpenguin to computers & internet (3 answers total)

If no one else manages to help you between now and the time you get to work, can you post the AS2.0 code involving the mechanism you're talking about? It's been awhile since I've worked in 2.0.

My first instinct is that you're not clearing the data of that first rollover. So you're getting trash building up.
posted by royalsong at 7:55 PM on September 21, 2011

"redirecting the file back to the start?"
What do you mean, you're gotoandStopping back to the first frame? Are you doing all the animation with the timeline animation or are you moving things with actionscript? Mixing the two can cause problems.

What is the first frame supposed to do? Maybe not everything there should be called a second time.

Without seeing the code for your rollover and rollout, I don't think the problem is obvious.
posted by RobotHero at 8:27 PM on September 21, 2011

Thanks, royalsong, for pointing me in the right direction. I found a couple of duplicated items that for some reason weren't going away. I re-did that part, and ta-da, one working flash file. (FWIW, I'd like to learn AS3, but as I'm still learning, and since everything we do has to publish back to Flash 8, I'm stuck learning AS2 for now. Not necessarily a bad thing, since it still works well.)
posted by azpenguin at 8:24 AM on September 22, 2011 [1 favorite]