Components

Abstract

Components are one of the most powerful new features of Macromedia Flash MX. They allow us to create compact, reusable objects such as those included with Flash MX, such as scrollbars, drop-down menus and radio buttons. The ability to build components is a very useful skill, and the approaches we take to make our components flexible and self-contained can be applied to other areas of Flash. We can use the same approach whenever we want to create self—contained objects with their own internal logic that can be slotted into larger systems. When creating a component, we are basically creating a new class, a template from which we can instantiate objects with their own methods and properties. When we drag a component on stage we create an instance of this class. The component is a movie clip, but it is also part of the new class that we’re defining; the new class inherits from the movie clip class, which means that it also has access to all the properties and methods of an ordinary movie clip.