flash actionscript: I've tried a variety of things such as:
_root.stepDescription.multiline = true;
_root.stepDescription.autoSize = true;
_root.stepDescription.textarea.wordWrap = true;

to no avail. how do I get an instance (or all of them) of a label component
(here the instance is named stepDescription)from the UI componenents to word
wrap.

The text property of the stepDescription of the label is dynamically populated
by XML.

Please help. It's much appreciated. I'll be able to stop wondering why these
Flash components don't work like VB components!

Bj

I am pretty sure that this was covered in an earlier post. I think she posted
under the name "B". Anyway this is basically what she found. The label's
properties are being set in the class definition of the label. If you look in
the folder:

Flash UI Components:Component Skins:Global Skins

You will see a component named FLabel. If you edit this component and look at
the code defining this class you will see two functions: setLabel and setSize.
I would try and set the autoSize, multiLine and wordWrap properties in one of
these 2 function definitions. Probably setLabel would be the best. This should
take care of the multiline and wordwrapping issues you are experiencing.

HTH.

Tim

Tim,
Thanks for your post and alerting me to B's post. I had not assumed that
radio button labels and check box labels were the same as the just lable UI
component. Following "B" 's instructions had no effect on my labels. The text
runs off the side of the screen. Perhaps this is the desired effect, but not
for me.

What I expect from a component called a label is that it will automatically
word wrap.

I guess I need to write some script that counts the number or chars in the XML
field that's populating the the label and then figure out how to force line
feeds.

Does anyone know how to force linefeeds?

thanks,
Bj

I'm making some progress with my insert linefeeds script but when I run it in
Flash, "A script in this movie is causing Flash to run slowly. If it continues
to run you computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script?"

//take care of linefeeds for stepDescription.text field
rawText = newSlideNode.firstChild.nodeValue;
rawTextLength = rawText.length;
breakpoint = 58;
if (rawTextLength > breakpoint)
{
while(charat(breakpoint) != " "){
breakpoint--;
}
substring1 = rawText.slice(0,breakpoint);
substring2 = rawText.slice(breakpoint++);
stepDescription.text = substring1 + newline + substring2;
}
else {
stepDescription.text = rawText
}

works fine if else is triggered instead of true condition for if statement.

I'm no good with this actionscript stuff. If its something obvious to those
of you who can see a missing semi colon from a mile away, please let me know.

Thanks,
Bj

I have attached a FLA that has the modifications to the FLabel component that I
was talking about. If you set the width of the check box and then do a Test
Movie you will see the label auto wrap to the second line. The auto wrap does
not appear in the authoring mode. If I figure out how to get it to do that I
will send you another post.

Tim

ah ha! Great answer Tim, but my question was the problem. I have flash MX 2004
pro and was using the label ui component, which doesn't exist by itself in
plain old flash mx. I didn't know it was new.

the label by itself behaves differentlly than the label attached to a radio or
checkbox as in the example tim posted.

I haven't managed to make it word wrap, but I do see that the labels attached
to radio buttons and check boxes do wordwrap, which is very helpful and
information I will use later.

in the attached file both .fla and .swf compiled for the Flash player 7 shows
that the label stand alone component doesn't word wrap even when the beside a
checkbox that does word wrap. (the fsLabel was modified to make the checkbox
label word wrap) There's a horizontal yellow line showing the end of the plain
jane label object. If autoflow is set to true, it runs over the yellow line
but never wraps.

So now I have learned that to get the functionality I want, I need to use a
textarea component. I've been able to get the XML to populate the textarea
which uses the construct mytextarea.content as opposed to what a new user might
logically expect based on the use of other components: mytextarea.text. Also
setting the background color on the textarea must be done with "color" in the
syntax as "Color" in the syntax won't work, which is counter intuitive to us
Windows users.

so setting the style for my labels looks like this:
myLabel.setStyle("fontSize", 14);
myLabel.setStyle("fontFamily", "_sans");
myLabel.setStyle("fontWeight", "bold");
myLabel.setStyle("color", "0xFFFFFF");

but setting style on the textarea looks a little different:
myTextArea.setStyle("fontSize", 14);
myTextArea.setStyle("fontFamily", "_sans");
myTextArea.setStyle("fontWeight", "bold");
_global.styles.TextArea.setStyle("backgroundColor", undefined);
myTextArea.setStyle("borderStyle","none");
_global.styles.TextArea.setStyle("color", 0xFFFFFF);

note the two globals. I could not get backgroundColor or color (font color)
to set on the instance the code was simply ignored. The only way to get the
textarea background and font color to be the same as the label was to apply a
global style to those 2 parameters

myTextArea.setStyle("color", 0xFFFFFF);
myTextArea.setStyle("backgroundColor", undefined);

these two lines of code were ignored, so I had to go with the global setting
from above.

But once you get past the differences between the class constructs for
textarea vs label, the textarea component is more powerful. It will
automatically wordwrap and if the content overflows the bounding box it will
automatically add a scroll bar. (This was a nice feature as in VB if I
anticipate that a scroll bar might be needed, then I have to attach it
programmatically to the textarea. In Flash, no extra code was needed to
convince the text area to add a scroll bar if needed.)

Bj

oh and one last thing,
for those of you that didn't catch my code error for the character count
insert newline function which I didn't end up using because it turns out the
textarea component meets my needs....

while(charat(breakpoint) != " "){

should be

while(rawText.charAt(breakpoint) != " "){

doh!