How to make a keyboard navigating multiple choice list in Flash and control it through actionscript?

Question

i am making an rpg style game in actionscript 3.0 and i want to make a multiple choice list. I know how to make the list with buttons and how to control it. My question is, how do you make a list that can be navigated using the keyborad arrows? What i am after is being able to hit up, and down to highlight the buttons and enter to chose the button.

Answer 1

You'll need to make the buttons as movieclips so that you can control which display state they are in (highlighted versus not).
Then you need to set up a listener for the keyboard keys so that you can have the selected button change and the execute if the Enter is pressed.  Here is a basic setup for a keyboard listener that shows how to detect the three keys you mentioned...
stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN,keyIsDown);
function keyIsDown(e:KeyboardEvent):void  {
         if (e.keyCode == Keyboard.DOWN) {
                 trace("DOWN");
         } else if (e.keyCode == Keyboard.UP) {
                 trace("UP");
         } else if (e.keyCode == Keyboard.ENTER) {
                 trace("ENTER");