Hello all,

I have a clip that is masked and it is going to be a week to week calendar. I
foresee a slight issue in regards to the published project being out of date
once the published week is in the past. How do I move the clip based on the
date so that the viewer sees the current week - and not the week that the file
was originally published? I can send the fla as visual aid since it's hard to
explain. (used to be able to upload file here hmm) Anyone care to take a stab?

Thanks.

Hi,

you can use the Date class to get the current date (taking the user's system
time/date). The attached code shows how to get the passed time from the first
day of the year until execution. Be aware that it starts the weeks count from
the weekday of january 1st and changes the week/mc at that day (for this year
it would be sunday), so you have to adjust it to the day you want. In my
example every friday would increase 'weeks', what can be used for moving the
MovieClip to the new entry.

cheers,
blemmo

DAY = 5;
// 0=sunday...6=saturday
//today
var now:Date = new Date();
//january 1st
var january:Date = new Date(now.getFullYear(), 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0);
//get milliseconds since 1970 for today and for january 1st of the same year
now_ms = Date.UTC(now.getFullYear(), now.getMonth(), now.getDate(),
now.getHours(), now.getMinutes(), now.getSeconds(), now.getMilliseconds());
january_ms = Date.UTC(now.getFullYear(), 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0);
//1000*60*60*24 ms == 1 day, +1 to show actual day
days = Math.floor((now_ms-january_ms)/86400000)+1;
//set the weekday to change mcs
days += 6-DAY+january.getDay();
weeks = Math.floor(days/7);
trace("days :"+days+" | week :"+weeks);

How about just any Event Calendar. I see a few on line - Sparks Event calendar
is one - but it's not working with my version of Flash (MX 2004). Are there
any out there that can have events added to easily?

Hi,

well it's not so much AS, it's more a mathematics thingie.
I assume you have a different MC or frame for each week, accessible through
IDs like "week1", "week2" etc. Now it's the task to find out in which week the
movie is played, and jump the player to that ID.
Flash has the 'Date' class, which stores date objects. With that, we can get
the date on which the movie is playing (in the code: var 'now'). Since there is
no calendar in Flash, we get the day and month of the year, but that doesn't
tell the week-number.
The Date class has also a property that returns the number of Milliseconds
since 1/1/1970 for a given date, UTC(). So we could take UTC() of 'now', minus
the UTC() of the date of 1/1/this_year and get the time passed this year. To
get the number of days out of the Milliseconds, apply the factor 86400000, and
ignore every Millisecond after the dot. This is all done in
days = Math.floor((now_ms-january_ms)/86400000)+1;
The "+1" is because it will return 0(.xxxx...) ms for day 1, but it's actually
day 1, not day 0.
So now we know the number of days since 1/1, and could calculate the week in
which we are. As this depends just on factor 7, the day of the week where a
week changes would be the day of 1/1. To set that weekday to another day, we
must add the difference to the wanted day as it's returned by Date.getDay().
Thats done in
days += 6-DAY+january.getDay();
You can set DAY at the beginning of the code to the weekday where you want the
display to be changed. Now we have the numbers of weeks that passed this year
and can tell the player to display the entry of that week.

This will change every 7 days. If you want to add events at unregular
intervalls, you'd need other code beside that.

blemmo