Flash Sound for Dynamic Sites - Page 11

The function will be called ‘sound’ and will take two arguments:

1. An event object. This is an object.
2. A play or stop flag. This argument is a string and can take a ‘true’ value or can be an empty string meaning ‘false’ or a different string meaning ‘false’ too.

The logic behind the function is as follows:

1. First detect the browser. This will help to branch the code to support NE and IE.
2. Using the Event object, retrieve the URL that is referenced by the HTML tag that called the function upon an event.
3. Use a JavaScript Regular Expression to split the URL you retrieved and pick up the part you’ll use. In our case you will use the name of the HTML file without the .htm or .html extension in the same way you acted when giving names to the Movie Clips.
4. Check if the play flag equals ‘true’ if the answer is yes, see next step. Else see step f.
5. Once you have the name of the web page, instruct the Flash ActiveX control or plug-in to play the Movie Clip whose name matches with the web page.
6. Stop the Movie Clip and move to its first frame.

Before diving into the code, I think that it is fair to note that it was tested only on the following browsers and platforms:

        Internet Explorer 5.5 on Intel PCs.

        Netscape Communicator 4.5 on Intel PCs.

        Netscape Communicator 4.7 on Power Macintosh.

No further testing of the code was performed since its writing (several months ago) so I am almost sure that this will break under Netscape 6 or older versions of each browser. Also keep in mind that as I said in the foreword, only the essential code is provided. It is up to you to tailor it to your needs. In fact the original code was much more complex but, it dealt with issues specific to the project it was developed for, so It has no place here.