TechNote (Archived)

Goto actions may not work with expressions in Macromedia Flash Player 5

Issue

---

A movie containing a goTo action that uses an expression for the target frame may not work properly in the Macromedia Flash Player 5 if the first character resolves to a number.

Note: This is an issue with the Flash Player prior to version 5,0,41,0. The problem was fixed with the latest release of the Flash Player (December 2000).

For example, in a Flash 4 movie , if a frame was given the label "3_Contents", the following code would send the playback head to that frame label:

 Set Variable: "index" = "3" Go to and Stop (index & "_Contents") 

However, in the Flash Player 5, this code example would cause the playback head to jump to frame number "3", and not frame label "3_Contents".

Note that in Flash 5, the concatenation operator has changed from the & operator to the + oradd operator, to be consistent with JavaScript syntax.

Reason

---

If the expression part of a goTo action consists of the concatenation of a number and a string, in that order, the Flash Player 5 incorrectly evaluates the expression as the integer value of the first character.

Solution

---

The expression will evaluate correctly if the order of the concatenation is reversed from 'integer + string' to 'string + integer'.

Practically speaking, this would mean that in the example discussed above the frame label '3_Contents' would need to be changed to 'Content_3' and the code example would need to change to the following:

 Set Variable: "index" = "3" Go to and Stop ("Contents_" & 3) 

Additional Information

---

For more general guidelines for naming objects, please refer toNaming strategies for Flash (TechNote 14727).

Search Support

---