Lesson 3. Understanding Target Paths

Communication is an important part of our everyday lives. We communicate by telephone, email, postal mail, and so on. Because nearly everyone communicates in a similar fashion, without a system of individual identification it would be impossible to route those communications from one person to another. We have unique phone numbers, email addresses, and street addressesall of which to help ensure that communication intended for us actually reaches us.

Just as phone numbers, email addresses, and street addresses lead communication to its intended recipient, Macromedia Flash target paths lead one timeline to another, allowing them to communicate. In this lesson, we'll take a look at the target paths used in typical Flash projects and show you how to use Flash's powerful ability to have timelines talk to each othera capability you'll use to give your projects more depth and sophistication.

A thorough understanding of target paths and how to use them will enable you to create sophisticated applications where independent timelines can work together to perform tasks. The "windowed" Flash application shown here (which we'll create in this lesson) is an excellent example of the way target paths can be used to give a project more depth and sophistication.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

In this lesson, you will:

• Gain an understanding of the hierarchy of timelines in Flash movies

• Learn about absolute and relative target paths

• Learn how movies communicate with each other

• Use the parent-child relationship in movies to create an "effect" clip

• Control specific timelines within a single project

• Control movies loaded into levels

• Learn how to make global references to various ActionScript elements

APPROXIMATE TIME

This lesson takes approximately one and one half hours to complete.

LESSON FILES

Starting Files:

Lesson03/Assets/currentTarget1.fla

Lesson03/Assets/rootTarget1.fla

Lesson03/Assets/parentTarget1.fla

Lesson03/Assets/movieclipTarget1.fla

Lesson03/Assets/backgroundControl1.fla

Lesson03/Assets/textBox1.fla

Lesson03/Assets/levelTarget1.fla

Lesson03/Assets/levelTarget3.fla

Lesson03/Assets/backgroundControl2.fla

Completed Projects:

currentTarget2.fla

rootTarget2.fla

parentTarget2.fla

movieclipTarget2.fla

textBox2.fla

levelTarget2.fla

levelTarget4.fla

backgroundControl3.fla