Components Learning Guide for Flash

Adobe Flash Professional CS5 components are building blocks for creating rich interactive applications on the web. By providing complex controls that behave in a consistent way and are ready to use and customize, components significantly reduce the time and effort needed to develop applications from scratch.

For example, rather than creating your own custom button, combo box, list, or video player, you can simply drag a component from the Components panel into your document during authoring. You can easily customize the look and feel of these components to suit your application design. Components share runtime libraries; once you've used one component in your application, adding another one does not greatly impact the size of your SWF file at runtime. Explore the sections below to dive into whatever topic interests you.

Note: This learning guide introduces components in Flash Professional and provides you with guidance for developing your skills. Always consult the Flash Professional online help first when learning to use new features in Flash.

Each component includes an ActionScript application programming interface (API) that allows you to customize it at runtime. The API allows you to handle events that occur when a user interacts with a component or when something significant happens to it. The API also enables you to set properties and call methods and to apply styles and skins to customize a component's appearance. Using ActionScript, you can also create a component instance at runtime and configure it as needed.

Adobe Flash Professional CS5 includes both ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3 components. You cannot mix these two sets. When you create a new Flash document, Flash Professional presents either ActionScript 3 components or ActionScript 2 components based on whether you choose an ActionScript 3 FLA file or an ActionScript 2 FLA file. When you open an existing FLA file, Flash determines which set of components to present based on whether the publish settings specify ActionScript 2 or ActionScript 3.