Lesson 15. A Component-Based Flash Quiz

In this lesson, you’ll complete the first part of the book’s final project: a Flash-based quiz that records user’s scores and identities into a database. As you look back over all you have learned, from interface layouts and static Web page design, through Macromedia Flash ActionScript and Dreamweaver and ColdFusion, you’ll see that you have learned quite a bit. In this final project, you’ll have a chance to pull it all together. The result combines a sleek Flash user interface, some ActionScript, a bit of ColdFusion coding, and data that gets sent in and out of Flash to a database.

Before you worry about sending data, you’ll need to build the Flash interface that collects the data. Macromedia Flash Professional 8 comes with a set of components that you can use to automate interface building. You got a taste of components when you used the TextArea component in Lesson 11, Nonlinear Flash Interactions, and Lesson 12, Drag-and-Drop Interactions. In this lesson, the components you’ll use are a bit more complicated; you’ll have to set more parameters, but you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to mock up a quiz using components.