Need help, Flash Transparent Background is blocking rest of web site

[brucec]

I have a Flash navigation bar on top of my web site. To allow pull down menus, I have a lot of height under the toolbar to allow the menus to load as external movies on different depths. Code is like this:

When Flash movie loads:
_root.createEmptyMovieClip("GearMenu", 4);
GearMenu._x = 27;
GearMenu._y = MenuYPos;

During a button's on(rollOver) event:
on (rollOver) {
closeMenus();
GearMenu.loadMovie("menuSupport.swf");
}

My FLA document height is 200 to accomodate these external movies loading into the menu. So, the background is transparent.

Unfortunately, the rest of my web site is blocked.

Any solutions?

[bcolflesh]

Do you have the wmode set to transparent?

[kb.adobe.com...]

[brucec]

Yes, I do, that is what makes it transparent in the first place, but the background is still there and any HTML elements underneath it are blocked.

[edgeportals]

LOL

Sorry to laugh, but it's nice to see someone else encountering this problem and actually wanting a solution. Let me guess, you're not using IE? Most likely Firefox? The IE flash plugin is slightly different (and separate) from the Firefox/Netscape/Mozilla plugin. Mozilla-based browsers lockout everything behind the transparency yet show the transparency, which to me is just dumb (whats the point).

The solution is quite complicated: a rewrite of how javascript handles mouseclicks on top of flash objects. THEN a companion routine inside flash to trigger capture those mouseclicks and trigger the new javascript click event.

Sounds impossible, but I did it several years ago. Of course, after months of development, I ended up scrapping the need for it! LOL, go figure!

Good Luck!

[edgeportals]

An easier solution might be to use what the flash ads use; javascript to resize the height of the menu from short to tall when needed. That way it only locks out part of your website when they're using the pulldown menu.

[brucec]

Thanks Edgeportals. It happened in both IE and Firefox.