Flash Lite remote loaded .swf interactivity

Not sure if anyone has ever noticed this, but strange things happen with Flash Lite 2.1 when you try remotely loading a .swf with dynamic variable text fields.

If you export the seperate .swf as Flash Lite 2.1 - any parameters and variables calling values on the root of the main movie just don't work - also buttons don't operate in the seperate movie etc.

Exporting as Flash 5 results in a similar problem.

If you export at Flash 6 it does seem to function, well some parts do - buttons etc fine, but some parameters just don't change for some reason when that file is loaded in dynamically into the Flash Lite 2.1 environment - all variables and params that are referenced show "null", even though they might be targetted to:

_root.counter

Why would you need to do this I hear you ask... well I was trying to load seperately a readout debug style display, to save memory in my main application. Had to give up in the end because, although it saved a little memory, it made the tool uttely useless for diagnosing issues with the app and server!

Quite suprising this. I'll be glad to see the day when I no longer need to use Flash Lite, and we can export to full Flash 10.1 - although I still haven't read anything yet about how the new player handles mobile specific FSCommands, e.g. checking network status, triggering vibrate on the phone, etc.

Flash Text Field autoSize="center"

Had the usual problems with autoSize on fonts today in Flash Pro 8 and Actionscript 2.0. After making a text box react to content length and reposition itself vertically (I wish Flash could do that like DTP software does) using code, I found some text was always cut off at the end of the paragraph.

After some experimentation, I found the following solution: Applying a leading command in code sorts it out, width and wordwrap values obviously contribute. Hopefully the code below will help anyone else that has the same problem. The border command is useful to show whats going on with the size of the text box.


var my_fmt:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
my_fmt.leading = 0;
description1.setTextFormat(my_fmt);
description1.wordWrap=true;
description1._width=453.2;
description1._height=300;
description1.border=true;
description1.autoSize="center";