Dealing with Data Types - Page 5

Objects

Objects can sometimes be a hard concept to grasp. I like to think of objects as small self contained piece of code that has its own "identity" and "methods" (In Flash 4 these would have been called "actions"). Think of a physical object like a person who has an identity (a name) and methods such as walk, run, hold, and my favourite, sleep.

The following is a list of all the predefined objects available in Flash 5.

In Flash, you can use predefined objects or you can custom build your own, like "customer", or "circle". We'll be teaching you how to build your own objects in a later tutorials. For now let's look at an example, the object "Date", which uses its methods to return information held in the system clock. You can download the source code for this file at the end of the tutorial to see first hand how the object works.

Here the date object (red) uses its methods (green) to retrieve system clock information

         onClipEvent (load) {
            days = new Array('Sunday', 'Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 
            'thursday', 'Friday', 'Saturday', 'Sunday');
            months = new Array('January', 'February', 'march', 'April', 
            'May', 'June', 'July', 'August', 'September', 'October', 
            'November', 'December');
            timedate = new Date();
         }
         onClipEvent (enterFrame) {
            hour = timedate.getHours();
            minutes = timedate.getMinutes();
            seconds = timedate.getSeconds();
            todaydate = timedate.getDate();
            day = timedate.getDay();
            dayname = days[day];
            month = timedate.getMonth();
            monthname = months[month];
            year = timedate.getFullYear();
            if (length(minutes) == 1) {
               minutes = "0"+minutes;
            }
            if (length(seconds) == 1) {
               seconds = "0"+seconds;
            }
            currenttime = hour+":"+minutes+":"+seconds;
            currentdate = todaydate+"/"+month+"/"+year;
            fulldate = dayname+" "+todaydate+" "+monthname+" "+year;
            delete timedate;
            timedate = new Date();

Let's now have a look at a special type of object - movie clip object.