MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-USING FLASH Use Manual page 78

You can share symbols among documents as shared library assets during authoring or at
runtime. For runtime shared assets, you can link assets in a source document to any number
of destination document, without importing the assets into the destination document. For
assets shared during authoring, you can update or replace a symbol with any other symbol
available on your local network. See "Using shared library assets" on page 104.
If you import library assets that have the same name as assets already in the library, you can
resolve naming conflicts without accidentally overwriting existing assets. See "Resolving
conflicts between library assets" on page 108.
For an introduction to using symbols and instances, see "Basic Tasks: Create Symbols and
Instances" in Flash Tutorials.
This chapter contains the following sections:
Types of symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
About 9-slice scaling and movie clip symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Editing movie clip symbols with 9-slice scaling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Runtime bitmap caching movie clip and button symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
About controlling instances and symbols with ActionScript. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Creating symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Creating instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Creating buttons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Enabling, editing, and testing buttons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Editing symbols. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Changing instance properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Controlling instances with behaviors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Creating custom behaviors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Best practices for using behaviors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Breaking apart instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101
Getting information about instances on the Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Copying library assets between documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Using shared library assets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Resolving conflicts between library assets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
78 Using Symbols, Instances, and Library Assets