Can you tell when a loaded SWF has reached its final frame?

Question

I used loadMovie to load an external SWF into the bottom-half
of a main "shell" swf. When that loaded SWF finishes playing (it's
just an animation), I need to populate a text field with the word
"DONE" . The text field resides on the _root, so I need some way to
know when the loaded SWF has reached its last frame...
This would obviously be easy if I had the .FLA of the loaded
SWF because I could just write the actionscript on the last frame
of that SWF to populate the _root textfield. Alas, I do not have
the source FLA of that loaded SWF, so I need some way to have the
main "shell" SWF/FLA know when that loaded SWF has reached its end.
Is this possible???
Thanks!!!

Answer 1

DIY_Lobotomy,
> The reality of my situation is that there's a "menu" of
sorts that
> gets loaded into "contentClip". This "menu" has a bunch
of links.
So far, so good.
> When clicked, each link loads a DIFFERENT swf into
"contentClip".
> It is THOSE swfs that I need to note the end of.
That's still okay.
> So, there's actually more than one, and they're not
exactly being
> loaded directly from my main movie, since they're
actually loaded
> based on a link being clicked in the movie that is
currently loaded
> into "containerClip"
The concept is still the same, no matter what. No matter how
deep the
one-clip-loads-another chain goes, you have to keep taps on
each chain link.
When the final link has loaded, you'll be able to make your
object reference
to that movie clip. That movie clip -- because it's an
instance of the
MovieClip class -- will have the _currentframe and
_totalframes properties.
You'll just be checking *that* cliip's properties instead of
the one named
contentClip in my own example.
You can loop using onEnterFrame or, if you prefer, with
setInterva().
That doesn't much matter either, so long as you repeatedly
poll the deepest
clip to test its current frame against its last frame (this
all assumes that
the clip being tested is a linear animation whose end
corresponds to its
last frame; otherwise, you could check _currentframe against
any arbitrary
frame number).
> I hope that wasn't too confusing! Do you still have a
solution???
Not too confusing to understand, but it might be confusing
to route
through in practice. Not confusing, actually, but meticulous
... you'll
have to be careful with your pathing. Nested movie clips are
very much like
nested folders on your hard drive. Their instance names
relate to the
folder names.
Now, if that menu doesn't have an instance name you provided
-- or if
any fork along the path has an instance name you can't
control -- you can
still reference the nested movie clips. If you test your file
in the
Debugger panel, you'll see all the instances laid out in
hierarchical order.
You'll see that automatic instance names are provided
(something like
"instance1", "instance2", etc.).
David Stiller
Contributor, How to Cheat in Flash CS3
http://tinyurl.com/2cp6na
"Luck is the residue of good design."