MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-LEARNING ACTIONSCRIPT 2.0 IN FLASH - Page 299

About working with built-in classes 299
To exclude classes from compilation:
1. Create a new XML file.
2. Name the XML file FLA_filename_exclude.xml, where FLA_filename is the name of your
FLA file without the extension.
For example, if your FLA file is sellStocks.fla, the XML filename must be
sellStocks_exclude.xml.
3. Save the file in the same directory as the FLA file.
4. Place the following tags in the XML file:
<excludeAssets>
<asset name="className1" />
<asset name="className2" />
</excludeAssets>
The values you specify for the name attributes in the <asset> tags are the names of classes
you want to exclude from the SWF file. Add as many as you require for your application.
For example, the following XML file excludes the mx.core.UIObject and mx.screens.Slide
classes from the SWF file:
<excludeAssets>
<asset name="mx.core.UIObject" />
<asset name="mx.screens.Slide" />
</excludeAssets>
For information on preloading classes, see “Preloading class files” on page 299.
Preloading class files
This section describes some of the methodologies for preloading and exporting classes in Flash
8 (including the classes that components in version 2 of the Macromedia Component
Architecture use). Preloading involves loading some of the data for a SWF file before the user
starts interacting with it. Flash imports classes on the first frame of a SWF file when you use
external classes, and this data is the first element to load into a SWF file. It is similar for the
component classes, because the framework for components also loads into the first frame of a
SWF file. When you build large applications, the loading time can be lengthy when you must
import data, so you must deal with this data intelligently, as the following procedures show.
Because the classes are the first data to load, you might have problems creating a progress bar
or loading animation if the classes load before the progress bar, because you probably want the
progress bar to reflect the loading progress of all data (including classes). Therefore, you want
to load the classes after other parts of the SWF file, but before you use components.
The following procedure shows you how to change the frame in which classes load into a
SWF file.