tellTarget

Availability

Flash Player 3. (Deprecated in Flash 5; use of dot notation and the with action is recommended.)

Usage

tellTarget("target") {
  statement(s);
}

Parameters

target A string that specifies the target path of the Timeline to be controlled.

statement(s) The instructions to execute if the condition evaluates to true.

Returns

Nothing.

Description

Deprecated action; applies the instructions specified in the statements parameter to the Timeline specified in the target parameter. The tellTarget action is useful for navigation controls. Assign tellTarget to buttons that stop or start movie clips elsewhere on the Stage. You can also make movie clips go to a particular frame in that clip. For example, you might assign tellTarget to buttons that stop or start movie clips on the Stage or prompt movie clips to jump to a particular frame.

In Flash 5 or later, you can use dot notation instead of the tellTarget action. You can use the with action to issue multiple actions to the same Timeline. You can use the with action to target any object, whereas the tellTarget action can only target movie clips.

Example

This tellTarget statement controls the movie clip instance ball on the main Timeline. Frame 1 of the ball instance is blank and has a stop() action so that it isn't visible on the Stage. When the button with the following action is clicked, tellTarget tells the playhead in ball to go to Frame 2 where the animation starts.

on(release) {
  tellTarget("ball") {
    gotoAndPlay(2);
  }
}

The following example uses dot notation to achieve the same results.

on(release) {
  ball.gotoAndPlay(2);
}

If you need to issue multiple commands to the ball instance, you can use the with action, as in the following statement.

on(release) {
  with(ball) {
    gotoAndPlay(2);
    _alpha = 15;
    _xscale = 50;
    _yscale = 50;
  }
}

See also

with