text=Understanding, Loading %26 Scrolling Text Fields
Part 3 of 3: Scrolling Text Fields Continuously
This week we are going to do one more simple addition to Part 2 of the scrolling tutorial. In part 2 we learned about the .scroll variable and used it to scroll a text field by an increment of choice on the onrelease event. This time, we are going to make a continuous scroll with the mouse press event and one movie clip.
So, we’ll set up everything just like part 2 was. We’ll load text into a text field named text and place 2 scroll buttons on the stage. Create a new movie clip (mc) called scroll. This mc will be scrolling the text verses part 2 where the buttons scrolled the text. We’ll be using the same formula, but now we are going to make a loop within the scroll mc to do all the work on frames that will loop.
On the first frame of the new mc, add a stop action because we don’t want the text to start scrolling without us telling it to. Name the second frame “up” by double clicking on the frame and clicking the label tab. On the third frame, add a goto and play frame 2 action. Name frame 4 “down” and on frame 5 add a goto and play frame 4 action. Now, look back. We have made 2 loops. One will start on frame 2 and loop forever or until told to stop by another source, and the other starts on frame 4 and loops the same way. Look back to our action in week 2 to understand the scroll property and formula we are using.
What we want to do is remove the actions from the buttons in part 2 and place them in the appropriate loop in our scroll mc. So in frame 2 we want to say “Set Variable: "../:text.scroll" = ../:text.scroll – 1 and in frame 4 we want to say Set Variable: "../:text.scroll" = ../:text.scroll + 1. You’ll notice we are targeting one level up so we have “../” in front of the variable (see Week 3 for Tell Targetting).
So all we need to do is tell the mc to play the right loop at the right time. Go back to your scroll buttons and assign the following actions: We want the up arrow to scroll up and the down to scroll down. 
On (Press)
      Begin Tell Target ("/scroll")
            Go to and Play ("up")
      End Tell Target
End On
On (Release)
      Begin Tell Target ("/scroll")
            Go to and Stop (1)
      End Tell Target
End On
Do the same for the down arrow and change the frame label “up” to “down”. You’re good to go. Start scrolling that text! On a closing note, this will be the last Flash 4 tutorial I will be writing for FlashPlanet. It’s time to move on to Flash 5. See you next week…
-b