My Flash Lab

Introduction to com.doitflash.text.TextArea (Part 2)

it’s easy to load external images into your text fields, you just use the native img tag like below and it will load and be shown inside your text block.

I’m not going to talk about how you initialize the TextField class and then set the htmlText property of it, it’s easy and there are millions of samples on the net to show you how you can create a TextField instance to load external data.

what I’m going to talk about in this post is how you can load animated gif files inside your Text field! because trying to load a gif file in TextField will just result in showing the first frame of the gif file. follow steps below and you will be able to load and play external animated gif files in no time.

You need to have downloaded the TextArea class > http://doitflash.com/
You should also have downloaded the image module > http://doitflash.com/?portfolio_mod=image-module

Downloading a module package means you will be able to use a new tag in your text field. to use a new tag you need the tag’s module swf file and the module package has all the files you need to compile the required swf file.

so, after downloading the image module package, go to “Src” folder to create the “TextModule_image.swf” file. leave this file for a while and we’ll get back to it a bit later.

now, open your AS3 project and insert this code:

Using TextArea instead of the classic TextField is the key and as you see in the above sample, you initialize and use the TextArea class just like how you used to work with TextField, the only changes are that you are setting the location of your module swf files with the “assetsPath” property and you use the “fmlText” rather than the classic “htmlText”.

the assets path is the location where you will store all your tag swf modules.

I hope this has been helpful.

Tags: AS3, image module tag, image tag, load animated gif files, load images inside textfield, support html tags, TextArea, TextField