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Adding Behaviors to Buttons

In Flash, behaviors are pre-written scripts that you can add to object instances in your movie. They appear in the Behaviors panel:

To add a behavior to the button you just created:

1. Make sure you’re in the Main Timeline, and not in Edit mode. In the Timeline, click frame 1, and then, on the Stage, select the button you just created.
2. It’s a good idea to name all the symbol instances you place on the Stage. Naming allows you to refer to them in script. It also enables additional selections in the Behaviors panel. In the Property Inspector, enter a name for the button instance, such as “myButton1”:

3. In the Behaviors panel, click the Add Behavior  button to open a menu of behaviors. Select Movie clip and then Goto and Play at frame or label.

A movie clip is essentially an animation that’s been converted to a symbol and resides on its own Timeline. We’ll demonstrate movie clips later in the tutorial, but for now, it’s enough to know that you can use this behavior to target a frame in either a self-contained movie clip or the Main Timeline. We’ll use the Main Timeline.

Selecting this behavior opens the Goto and Play at frame or label dialog:

If you had added movie clips from the library, their instances would appear in the list beneath _root, which represents the Main Timeline of the movie. Notice that “this” appears in the field above the list. The “this” keyword indicates the current object. When you select a target location from the list, Flash fills in the field with a relative path, if Relative is selected in the dialog, starting with the current object (“this”). If Absolute is selected in the dialog, Flash fills in an absolute path, starting with _root. We’ll describe this method of targeting objects in more detail later in the tutorial.

4. At the bottom of the dialog, enter the number 3 to tell Flash to move forward in the Main Timeline (_root) to frame 3 when the button is pressed.
5. Click OK.