Detecting the end of a movie clip

Question

Hi,
Objective: Display a book that the user can turn the pages to
view more text. I used a tutorial from the web to create the
turning page.
Process: On layer 1, frame 1 of the main time line, I put an
image of a book. On layer 2, frame 1 and also frame 2 of the main
time line, I put text for the book. I then created a movie clip
(MC) called PageTurnMC that looks like a page in the book is being
turned. On layer 3 of the main time line, I put an instance of the
MC and called it PageTurn. On layer 4 of the main time line, I put
a button to play the MC and advance to frame 2 called drawer1cont
(see code).
//code on the button used to turn the book's page
on (release) {
PageTurn.play(); //plays my PageTurnMC
gotoAndStop("drawer1cont"); //advance to the next frame of
text
Problem: I need to detect when the end of the MC before I
advance to the next frame. I have to use the PageTurnMC many times,
so it is not possible for me to put the action in the last frame of
MC. As of right now, my frame 2 text appears as the PageTurnMC
plays which is not what I want.
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

I just tested it and got my quick example to work. Here are a
couple of possible areas to double check:
In the last frame of PageTurnMC, gotoAndStop must reference
the main movie clip, e.g. _root.gotoAndStop().
Also, make sure the parameter _root.frameID isn't in quotes
because it is a variable, not the actual string.
As I said, I'm not a Flash expert nor do I know the setup of
your movie, but this should work as long as you have all of your
references correct. If you can't get it to work, try to trace
necessary variables to make sure you are accessing the appropriate
variable.
The suggestion by nilu_only will also work, but it will waste
some cycles because you will have to wait for the movie clip to
end. Here is what I mean:
Immediately after playing PageTurn, accessing
PageTurn._currentFrame will return the currentFrame only once. So
if PageTurn isn't on its lastFrame, your condition statement
(PageTurn_currentframe == PageTurn._totalframe) will fail and
gotoAndStop will never be called.
Instead, you would need to wait for some time and continually
check the _currentFrame until the condition statement is true, e.g:
on (release) {
PageTurn.play();
while (PageTurn_currentframe != PageTurn._totalframe) {}
//wait until reaches the last frame
gotoAndStop ("drawer1cont")
This approach is likely to be suboptimal since you are
wasting cycles checking the current frame instead of just having
the movie let you know when it has reached the last frame.
Depending on how Flash handles that while statement, you could have
serious slowdown from that while statement. And since Flash doesn't
have a sleep() function, you would have to do some sort of
setTimeout() to slow down those checks. Either way, I would venture
to say this approach is better off avoided.