passing variable to flash to highlight naviation item

[ejbiv]

Hi,

Can anyone help me pass a variable from the html on a page to the flash navigation to tell flash to highlight or add a graphic infront of the navigation item the user is on.

For Example:

* Home
News
About Us

User clicks on News the News page loads and the * now appears infront of News.

- Ed

[NTD]

Hi,

Why would you need to communicate between the HTML page and the Flash navigation movie? Couldn't you put a highlight movieclip inside the Flash animation to serve as a highlighter without any HTML communication?

[ejbiv]

Lets say I want to create one movie and use it across the entire web site. I want to only add one piece of code to the html page to tell flash which nav item to highlight.

showing where a user is within a site is important for good usability. We should primarily use flash for pieces of a site and not as the entire site.

- Ed

[NTD]

Hi,

There are many ways you could achieve this....

Create a highlight MC and toggle it's position based on the button or movieclip the mouse is over....

on(rollover){
highlightMC._x=this._x;
highlightMC._y=this._y+20;
}

Create a highlight MC for each button and toggle the visible property on rollover .....

on(rollover){
this.highLightMC._visible=true;
}
on(rollout){
this.highLightMC._visible=false;
}

Or maybe something like this sliding menu highlight demo...

http://ntdesigns.net/demoFiles/slideMenuHighlighter.swf

These are all contained in the navigation .swf and would not require any communication with the HTML page.

[ejbiv]

Hi,

Can anyone point me in the right direction for passing a variable into flash that would allow flash to take that variable and show the position of a graphic in a certain area. Much like turning an image on and off.

For instance, if you have a flash piece you are using for your global navigation and you want to include a variable on each of your web pages like:

navigation="1"

so your highlight for nav item 1 is shown.

When the user moves to another page you could use

navigation="3"

so your highlight indicates the right section of the site you are within.


It is important that a variable is passed into flash and that flash then acts accordingly. I don't want to make the entire site out of flash so I need this one flash movie to accept the variable.


Please view this page:

http://www.uxdesigns.com/UX_Process_Nav.swf

Note the orange arrow infront of the first nav item. As the user uses this nav I want the next page to load and have the orange arrow appear infront of the item they are on.



Many thanks, Ed