Frog Style components are excellent, easy to use components to add professional navigation to your site. They back there inexpensive components up with great technical support. 5 out of 5 stars for excellent well design product and out of this world customer service!
Kevin Airgid,
Airgid Media Inc.

My experience with frog style web engineering is the greatest buying experience I had so far on Internet (and believe me I'm buying very often)

The application was working very well, with great examples, and when I wanted some information I received almost instant reply.

If you are wondering if you should buy or not... don't hesitate a second, they are fantastic!
John L. (Canada)



 
Reference - getting started
It's easy to control the menu by ActionScript, technically, you need only those two functions:

addMenu(label:String [, icon:String])
label: the text you want the menu to have
icon: Optional, pass in the link name of the library-item you have exported for ActionScript use
returns: a pointer to the menu that just was added, type: MovieClip of class menu_object

addSubMenu(label:String, href:String, target:String)
label: the text on the submenu-item
href, target: for your convenience and since most of the usage will be as a link-menu to external HTML pages, you can specify an action that links to URL with this arguments
returns: a pointer to the submenu of type MovieClip (class fsNavigation2_submenu)

it's not neccessary to save a reference to each menu you added (var m0:MovieClip = addMenu...), they're stored as an array in the fsNavigation instance. You can access them by typing my_fsNav.menus[i], where my_fsNav is the name of your fsNavigation instance and i the position (zero-based) of the menu you want to change.
Probably, it makes your life easier if you store references yourselves, it's up to you.
Reference - advanced Features
features of the fsNavigation class:

addMenu(label:String [, icon:String])
label: the text you want the menu to have
icon: Optional, pass in the link name of the library-item you have exported for ActionScript use

returns: a pointer to the menu that just was added, type: MovieClip of class menu_object

setDataProvider(xml:XML)
set an XML object as data provider for your navigation. More information follows.

menulabel_y usage example: my_fsNav.menulabel_y = -2
sets the y-position of the menu labels. If you need to change that, do it before you start adding any menus

openMenu
returns the currently open menu, type: MovieClip

menus
returns an array of type MovieClip with all the menus you added

features of the menu_object class:

addSubMenu(label:String, href:String, target:String)
label: the text on the submenu-item
href, target: for your convenience and since most of the usage will be as a link-menu to external HTML pages, you can specify an action that links to URL with this arguments

returns: a pointer to the submenu of type MovieClip (class submenu_object)

setIcon(icon: String)
sets an icon or replaces the current one. Pass in the link name of the MovieClip you want to use as an icon

setColor(color:Color) - usage example: my_fsNav.menus[0].setColor(0xFF0000)
changes the background-color of this menu. The submenus you add after that operation receive the same color. You need to pass in a hexadecimal value 0xRRGGBB .

setTextFormat(textformat:TextFormat)
changes the font to the format you passed in. Is applied to submenus like the setColor property.

openMenu()
opens this menu, if not already open

closeMenu()
closes this menu, if open

text
sets or gets the text of the menu

submenus
returns an array of type MovieClip with all the submenus you added to this menu

finally, the features of the submenu_object class:

setColor(color:Color) - usage example: my_fsNav.menus[0].setColor(0xFF0000)
changes the background-color of this submenu

setTextFormat(textformat:TextFormat)
changes the font to the format you passed in.

text
sets or gets the text of the menu

since both addMenu and addSubMenu return a reference to these MovieClip instances, you can go and set different actions for each, e.g., to control your movie. But please note, you can also destroy the functionality of the menu if you do not know what you're doing.
If you want a submenu to do a certain action, type my_submenu.onRelease = function(){// whatever here};

For changing the action of a menu object, use my_menu.hit.onRelease = function(){//something here};
but then, the submenus won't appear anymore unless you include openMenu() in your function.
Reference - the last part
Please note that fonts are not exported at default, so make sure you use a font that most internet users have, like Arial, Verdana, Tahoma and so on.

There's another thing with fonts. It looks like it's a Flash bug: For some reason, Flash can't calculate the height of the text in a textinput (but the feature textHeight exists). The result is, that you probably want to move the menu-labels in the vertical direction. You can do this before you add any menu by setting the menulabel_y property of the fsNavigation instance to a value around zero. -2 is fine for Arial Narrow, 0 is fine for Tahoma or Verdana.

If you want to do more, you can, of course. You can change the color and font of each menu and submenu, but you need to do it manually. Also, please note that the order you change the appearance matters. If you change the color of a menu and then add the submenus to it, this submenus will inherit the color you just set. If you do it after inserting submenus, only the menu is changed and the kids do not inherit anything.

Maybe you don't like the look of these menu buttons. It's not that I would be disappointed because I spent many hours on the design, it's your choice. Please refer to the file fsNavigation_assets.fla. There are some MovieClips inside. Drage the ones you need to change to your FLA with the fsNavigation and change them. The fsNavigation will use your MovieClips.
You most probably want to change (or remove) the "3D-effect". To do so, you need the MovieClip menu_object which contains menu_middle and menu_right and the left part is directly on the layer shades. Make sure you export you menu_object into first frame, that makes Flash using your version. Please do not remove any items from these object, just make them invisible or whatever.
Please also note that I can't support you on these matter.

 
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to start using fsNavigation, drag an instance from the Components panel (Ctrl-F7) to your stage.
change the width of the component using the Properties panel (Ctrl-F3)
press Alt-F7 to display the Component Inspector. You can change the colors and fonts there.
now you need to populate the navigation. Press F9 to display the Actions window and start to enter the commands according to the sample or the reference on the left
if you want to use icons, create a movie clip for each and export it for ActionScript (right click on the movie clip in the Library, Ctrl-L, and select 'Linkage...'
you can also use XML to populate the navigation component. Please refer to the code snippet below.

If you want to use XML as input for your navigation, please use the code below. And to help you build the XML file, please refer to this page.

To attach custom events to menu items, write:
// create an event listener
var el:Object = new Object();
el.onRelease = function()
{
    // insert your code here
    trace(this + ".onRelease()");
}
// attach that eventlistener to some menu or submenu item:
your_menu_item.addEventListener(el);

Gianni Frey
Gianni Frey
Gianni Frey is a ColdFusion, C#, and Flash Programmer, and a Layout Designer. He currently studies Computer Science at ETH Zurich.

gianni@frogstyle.ch

 
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