Navigation Using Flash®

When using Flash® to interpret and display a site navigation, you will need to do some server programming. Thanks to Flash®’s built-in xml support, the page structure can be fed directly into Flash® and analyzed there.

You are recommended to familiarize yourself with action script’s xml class if you want to use the page strucutre in Flash®. To simplify things for you, the following example is provided. For more information, please see the documentation that comes with Macromedia® Flash.

 

Example of a Flash®-based Navigation

This example comes from the web site http://www.bsk.se/, which uses a Flash®-based navigation in its lower section. In the version you see below on this page, the page structure from www.consolo.se has been used.

 

To see how the menu levels can expand, click e.g. Developer Area and then Page Structure & Navigation.

This navigation can handle a maximum of 7 objects on each level, and a maximum of 4 levels. Folders don’t have any index files. This can however easily be changed and added in the code.

Download the archive below and decompress it (unzip it). You should also installed the included font for the example to work well.

Image bsk_navigation.zip


For further instructions, see the comments in the code. A good aid is also the documentation of the xml class in Macromedia® Flash.

When implementing this type of navigation, you usually have to use frames. This is specifically covered in the section Using Frames »