Button Parameters

The Button component has a list of parameters, found in the Parameters tab and the Component Inspector, that are designed to allow a UI artist the ability to set some basic button properties without modifying the code. These parameters are:

• disabled: set to true to disable a button
• disableFocus: set to true to disallow a button to receive focus
• disableConstraints: set to true to disable counter scaling of the label
• label: enter the text label here that the button will display at runtime
• toggle: set to true to allow a button to toggle on or off
• visible: set to false to hide a button at runtime

Figure 5: The Button component parameters in CS3 (Parameters Tab).

Parameters can be added to the list by modifying the Button.as file. This is done by adding an inspectable statement above a member variable or getter/setter function that has a modifiable property such as a Boolean (e.g., true or false). For instance, the following inspectable statement was added directly above the block of code responsible for setting a button’s label, thus allowing the UI artist to set the button label via the Parameters panel within Flash, rather than via code:

[Inspectable(name="label", defaultValue="")]

Directly above the toggle variable in Button.as, is the following inspectable statement, allowing the UI artist to set toggle to true or false via the Parameters tab:

[Inspectable(defaultValue="false")]