Getting Started
 Animation
 Optimization
 Interactivity
 Sound
 Physics
 Dynamic Content
 Player Scripting
 App. Scripting
 Additional Utilities

 LiveMotion™ 1

 Add a Tutorial

I want to start of by explaining why I have made this an Intermediate - Advanced tutorial. For the Intermediate user, you can download my simpleForm.liv file in our Library Items section. This is a complete form, containing all of the scripts needed. The only script you need is the ASP script to make it work. An Intermediate user could skip right to Part III and just setup the ASP script and be done. I would suggest that EVERYONE read this tutorial completely as I cover some basic information on how to setup a form, validate the fields and give some logical interaction to your forms, making the experience for your visitors a little more pleasant in trying to contact you. I would also like to say that I welcome ANY comments on this tutorial and LIV file, please use the working form below to contact me.

Support Languages: ASP - CFML - PHP

LiveMotion Forms - Part I

Adobe LiveMotion 2.0 enables you to communicate with server side scripts using ActionScript. One of these methods are called loadVariables. If you read my tutorials on Dynamic Text, you will remember how we loaded a text file from the server, with a variable name called myText. The text fields in LiveMotion allow you to name them or assign a variable. We will use these variable names in our server side script to interact with the Text Fields in our SWF Form, as well as emailing the submitted information to you.

Setting up our Form Objects.

In the first part of this tutorial we will be making our form. There are two ways we can do this, One you can download the the simpleForm Library Item from LiveMotionCentral.com or you can make your own.

simpleForm Library Item:
http://www.livemotioncentral.com/files/library.asp#Simple_Form

The simpleForm Library Item is what we will be using in this tutorial, but if you decide to use your own, follow the simple instructions below for setting up your form. If you are using the simpleForm.liv Library Item from LiveMotionCentral.com, simply skip to Part III unless you want to read on.

1. You will need 4 Single Line Text Fields, and 1 Multi Lined Text Field.

2. You will need the following field names, the comments field will be our multi lined text field. Next to each name below is the variable name we will be using.
   
   A. Name = txtName
   B. Email = txtEmail
   C. URL = txtURL
   D. Comments = txtComments
   E. Status = txtStatus

3. Make sure that Fields A, B, C, and D are set to allow user input. Do not check "Export as HTML" if you do, the email you will get will have html code in it. If you decide to setup a script that sends your email as HTML, you would use this option. We are going to use a plain text email in this example so DO NOT CHECK this field.

4. Our comments field is going to allow the user to scroll the text field if they input large amounts of text. To setup a scrolling text box, you can either download my Text Scroller Library Item, or you can review my tutorial on Dynamic Text Part II

   Text Scroller Library Item:
   http://www.livemotioncentral.com/files/library.asp#Text_Scroller

   Dynamic Text Part II Tutorial:
   http://www.livemotioncentral.com/tutorials/Dynamic/0002/

5. Finally, we need a submit and reset button. Your buttons will need to have at least two states for each button. A Normal state, and a Down state.

6. Now, we are going to make each field required, we will go over this in part two, but for now, add a little red arrow to the right of each field.

7. When some one tries to submit the form, and a required field is not completed, we want a sound to play, so pick a nice error sound to use. I just used one of the sounds that came with LiveMotion. When you have added the sound file, convert it to a Movie Clip Group, and we need to do some things to the timeline and make sure it only plays when we want it to.
   
   A. Frame 00 Add a label and name it "a".
   B. Frame 00 Add a script, and in the script add the following code. this.stop();
   C. Frame 01 Add a label and name it "b"
   D. Frame 01 Add a script, and in the script add the following code. this.play();
   E. At the end of your sound, Add a new script, and add the following code. this.gotoAndStop('a');
   F. Finally, make sure that your sound file starts on Frame 01 and not Frame 00.

8. Now that you have made all the elements needed for your form, we want to select EVERY OBJECT and convert it to a Movie Clip Group or MCG. To do this, select all of the objects click on Object -> Make Movie Clip Group. Now name the MCG to form.

Your composition and timeline should look like this.

part
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6