Working with Movie Clips and Buttons > Manipulating buttons with ActionScript |  |

Manipulating buttons with ActionScript

Each button in a Flash movie is an ActionScript object of the class Button and has its own properties and methods. Buttons have the same properties as movie clips, but several properties (`_currentframe`, `_droptarget`, `_framesloaded`, and `_totalframes`) are not supported and return the value `undefined`. The Button class has two additional properties: `useHandCursor`, which lets you decide whether the cursor turns into a hand when it passes over a button, and `enabled`, which lets you specify whether the button is active or not.

You can give a button an instance name in the Property inspector and use a target path to manipulate it with ActionScript. To write a target path for a button instance, write the target path to the movie clip in which the button is located, and add a dot (`.`) and the instance name of the button. The following example disables the button instance `myButton` on the Timeline of the movie clip `childClip`, which is on the Timeline of the movie clip `parentClip`:

    parentClip.childClip.myButton.enabled = false;

For a complete list of Button methods and properties, see Button (object) in the ActionScript Dictionary.