Flash MX Audio Player - Page 14

Limiting the dragger

It's time to start working on the dragger. Our dragger will ultimately control what frame of our sound the playhead is on.

We will need to limit its movement to horizontal movement so it can't move up and down, and additionally limit its horizontal movement to only what has been downloaded so far (that will be defined by the current width of our progressBar).

Nothing fancy here, just making use of the various dragger methods in Flash. Here is the code to add to the functions layer:

function startDragger() {
        gotoAndStop("moveMedia");
        var leftLimit = progressBar._x;
        var rightLimit = progressBar._width + progressBar._x;
        startDrag("draggerBTN", false, leftLimit, progressBar._y, rightLimit, progressBar._y);
}

function stopDragger() {
        gotoAndStop("mediaPlaying");
        stopDrag();
}

When the visitor starts dragging, we move to the frame labelled moveMedia so that our mover movie clip stops trying to update the slider. When the visitor stops dragging, we go back to the mediaPlaying frame label so that our mover movie clip starts updating the slider again as the sound plays.

This code needs to be placed on your draggerBTN:

on (press) {
        startDragger();
}

on (release, releaseOutside) {
        stopDragger();
}

Time to test it (Ctrl+Enter). Your dragger should now drag okay, but it won't be affecting anything because we haven't written any ActionScript for this yet. And when you release the dragger, it will snap back to the position that is appropriate for the position of the sound playhead because we haven't been changing the playhead position when you were dragging the slider.

Test the streaming (Ctrl+Enter again). You should only be able to drag within the bit that has been loaded.

One more bit to code and we've finished with our slider.