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October 27, 2005

Custom Context Menus in Flash 8

I was reminded by some comments at Tinic's blog about the hassles of making custom context menus in Flash. If a parent movie clip and a child movie clip both have context menus set, the parent's menu is always shown, even when clicking on the child.

At least that's how it used to be....

Flash Player 8 changed this behavior to something more intuitive. The deepest child with a context menu that satisfies the hitTest gets to provide the menu.

To preserve backwards compatibility, the new behavior only applies to SWF8 content and later. To demonstrate, I whipped up an example. There is no difference between the two movies except the SWF version they are published to.

Right-click all over the movies to see what I'm talking about.

Published to SWF 7:




Published to SWF 8:



If you're really curious, download both samples here.

Posted by emalasky at October 27, 2005 04:36 PM

Comments

I also blogged about it sometimes back...

http://www.abdulqabiz.com/blog/archives/flash_and_actionscript/000123.php

Posted by: Abdul Qabiz at November 6, 2005 11:30 AM

Ah, that's great, that was a huge annoyance previously.

Strangely, the new linux flash player exhibits exactly the same behavior on both movies (gets the correct child context menus)

Posted by: David R at October 27, 2006 08:38 PM

flash player 9 on mac also produces exactly the same results for both swfs.

Posted by: flashape at October 27, 2006 09:30 PM

I'm using Flash player 9 on XP in Firefox (the 9 debug browser plugin) and I too see exactly the same (intended) result for both swfs - I'm guessing that version 9 of the player has removed the old style way the context menus worked?

Anyway, this is handy I guess.

Posted by: Jon B at October 28, 2006 03:02 AM

Anybody now how to pass multiple parameters to the Context Menu?

Posted by: Rick at November 23, 2006 07:31 PM

It seems that some things changed again with Flash 9 (on any platform). anyone know about this?

Posted by: daniel larsen at November 28, 2006 01:16 PM

Here is the same appli, slightly modified for Cairngorm2 final, and FP9.
I included CG2 in the source, you can run it as a project on Eclipse..

Posted by: arkadas at September 19, 2007 09:11 PM

very good nice site..do you like to adana ??

Posted by: saglik at September 19, 2007 09:13 PM

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