Dynamically changing a flash movie

[SethCall]

I am just now learning Flash, and I gotta ask you guys:

is their a way to dynamically change the size of a flash movie? On top of that, can you make it "move", my changing left and top property in your stylesheet?

I noticed that the object tag has a nasty hardcoded height= and width= property. Can you use percentages for that? Or better yet, leave them out and use a style sheet instead? I have been searching all over, and all my searches lead to a talk about using tables to stretch the movie, but im really looking for a more elegant way of doing so.

If you *could* change the size and move your flash movie around, you could so some pretty interesting things I imagine.

Thanks for any help guys. I usually hang out in the CSS forums, but you might see a little more of me in here from now on too :)

[mivox]

My first guess is that you might need javascript for those sorts of changes... but hopefully bumping the thread will call out some Flash experts who know more specifics.

[SethCall]

yeah i figure javascript would be a part of it.

for instance, lets just say you can not control the width/height/left/top of a flash movie from css.

well, there is the "setAttribute" javascript function,

which allows you to change the exact attribute writtin in the tag.

So I have 2 things to try, once i get a sample flash movie (im at work so it will be a few hours).

one is this <object id="flashMovie" width="300px" height="300px">blahblabah</object>

and then to do a

document.getElementById("flashMovie").style.width = "400px"

, and see what that does.

If that doesn't do anything, then I will give

document.getElementById("flashMovie").setAttribute("width","400px")

a try

Im hopeful I can work that somehow. Just have to test it in a little bit.

[SethCall]

First of all, everyone should be aware of this: this has caused me unknowable heartache:

I dont believe this is a problem in a non-local situation (client-server).

but say you have your html file and flash movie on your harddrive.

Well, Mozilla takes just a wee bit of time to load the movie, even though its local. But it also doesn't responsd to "PercentLoaded()", which is a problem. Commanding the movie using javascript-to-flash scripting fails (cuz the object in the DOM model isn't there yet, or something like that).

So, before you try to control the flash movie, do a setTimeout before your first function (like StopMovie, or GotoFrame, or whatever you are trying to do).

But, I dont *think* this is an issue in a normal situation: just when you are testing on a local machine...

Back to messing with controlling the width/height and position of the flash movie on the fly :)