As2 books catalog, multiple movieclips, search engine

Hi, i know someone can help me with this because there are a few flash masters over here hehe.

In the flash website i'm developing for my church's library, now i need to create a books catalog. This consists in a main movieclip for the catalog section, then inside of it will be the movieclip thumbnails of all the books. I know I will be using a lot of FOR LOOPS, arrays and XML load vars, etc. to achive this.

I need to be able to have the books info and the books front cover as an external .jpg and name them cover1.jpg, cover2.jpg, etc. also I need to create a search engine to search for a specific book, by name or by category and force the search input textbox to be small letters only (so I don't have to work with the case sensitive thing).

This is the main feature of my church's library website and they are thinking about launching the site on february-march aproximately.

If I don't manage to make this possible, i would have to create all the movieclips manually inside the main flash file, then put all the books movieclips into frames from 1 to 1,000 or much more (a lot of books heh?) then creating a function to detect if the word typed in the input textbox is equal to "apple" then myBooks.gotoAndStop("appleFrame");,
if the word typed in the input textbox is equal to "how to pray" then myBooks.gotoAndStop("howtoPrayFrame"); and that's a really HARD WORK.

So if someone is touched by this project, i know God will bless him/her a lot. Any help welcome :) thanks have a nice day

Hope you get someone how will do all the work for you.

Why don't you hire someone to make your life better for this type of projects?

That will be your benefit in both learning and get the site done.

Usually this will take two nested for loops to display the products in grid, and an if else statement for a pagination or at least a next previous page navigation to navigate n number of products.

Manual set-up will not work for these kind of projects. You have to make it more dynamic so that it will come really flexible to search and to load also.

You can PM me if you need to know anything else for this project.


Regards



arkitx

Thanks for the reply. I dont like people make things for me, I like to learn and put that in practice. I only want someone to throw a light on me so I know what way I will take to achieving this. I already know How to create the multiple movieclips dynamically, and how to assign it a number

PHP Code:

---

for (var i=0; i<=400; i++){
    mc+[i].loadMovie(myClips);
    trace(mc+[i]+".jpg")
}
var myClips="thumb"+[i]+".jpg"; 


---

And also I can search in this forum how to load content from XML with loadvars (i've done this with a textfile).

But I need some light to know how to make this, in a way that can be easier for the search engine.

Also, how to create the empty clips, so there is a space/gap between each one like 10 or 15px. forming a grid as you said.

PHP Code:

---

var h_pad:Number = 10;
var v_pad:Number = 15;

var container:MovieClip;

for (var i = 0; i<4; i++) {
    for (var j = 0; j<3; j++) {
        container = attachMovie("empty_container", "product_container", this.getNextHighestDepth());
        container._x = h_pad+(container._width+h_pad)*i;
        container._y = v_pad+(container._height+v_pad)*j;
    }
} 


---

Try this...



arkitx

Ok that works. But why I use a trace ( trace(container); and i get only
_level0.mc0
_level0.mc1
_level0.mc2
_level0.mc3

if there are 12 movieclips created?

Ok! Fixed it!
container = attachMovie("mc", "container"+[j], this.getNextHighestDepth());

added the

PHP Code:

---

 "container"+[j] 


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and added the less than or equal to sign

PHP Code:

---

 for (var j = 0; j<[B]=[/B]400[B]+1[/B]; j++) { 


---

and now i can trace my 400 movieclips.

Thanks for the help! The hard work comes later, when I load the .jpg's into each container with the XML loadVars...

PHP Code:

---

var h_pad:Number = 10;
var v_pad:Number = 15;

var container:MovieClip;

for (var i = 0; i<4; i++) {
    for (var j = 0; j<3; j++) {
        container = attachMovie("empty_container", "product_container", this.getNextHighestDepth());
        container._x = h_pad+(container._width+h_pad)*i;
        container._y = v_pad+(container._height+v_pad)*j;
        trace(container);
    }
} 


---

Always post your code before asking. That will help others to understand the problem.



arkitx

Yeah i know i must post the code before asking, i have always done that way, but this thread clearly has no Initial code to post, i was asking for help, then i tried the for loop script and no success, then you successfully helped. It is a huge project that will be step by step scripted. The first step of the project has completed thanks to you. The movieclip containers are created, now the second step: load data into them with XML loadvars (book information, cover image/thumbnails .jpg's/, etc.)

You might need this in the next ..

PHP Code:

---

var h_pad:Number = 10;
var v_pad:Number = 15;

var container:MovieClip;

for (var i = 0; i<3; i++) {
    for (var j = 0; j<4; j++) {
        container = attachMovie("empty_container", "product_container", this.getNextHighestDepth());
        container._x = h_pad+(container._width+h_pad)*j;
        container._y = v_pad+(container._height+v_pad)*i;
        container.name=i+":"+j;
        container.onRelease=show_details;
        trace(container);
    }
}
function show_details () {
    trace(this.name);
} 


---

arkitx

Thanks. The details will be on the external .xml as a string, and it will be loaded into the show_details() function, so I don't have to edit the flash file each time I add a book. Everything will be specified in the XML and flash will load it from there and create the needed movieclips and dynamic textboxes
to load the content for each book.

PHP Code:

---

Stage.scaleMode = "noScale";

var h_pad:Number = 10;
var v_pad:Number = 25;

var container:MovieClip;
var label:TextField;
for (var i = 0; i<3; i++) {
    for (var j = 0; j<2; j++) {
        container = attachMovie("empty_container", "product_container", this.getNextHighestDepth());
        container._x = h_pad+(container._width+h_pad)*j;
        container._y = v_pad+(container._height+v_pad)*i;
        container._name = "Product "+String(container.getDepth());
        label = container.createTextField("label", 0, 0, container._height+2, container._width, 20);
        label.text = container._name;
        container.onRelease = show_details;
        trace(container);
    }
}
function show_details() {
    trace(this._name);
} 


---

arkitx

Thank you! That will help a lot.