Comments on: scale9Grid – When it works and when it does not

By: admin

admin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 22:16:22 +0000

You are right about one thing: the vector drawings drawn in the editor are not stored in the graphics object that you can manipulate with as. That’s just to keep the graphics “safe”. But you can still apply successfully scale9Grid in code to a movieclip created and draw in IDE, as long as you follow the guidelines: make sure all drawing is directly inside the movieclip and not inside any other child, the movieclip shouldn’t contain children (or if contains be even more careful and still apply scale9Grid to only the graphics object, the children won’t be affected by the scale9Grid setting on their parent)..
The movieclip will even resize correctly if you put drawings on more keyframes. – in the zip file, check scale9GridEx1 for example

You can also apply successfully scale9Grid to loaded content (actually this is how Flex is setting scale9Grid to skins created in flash), but you must make sure to not apply scale9Grid to the Loader object but rather to the actual content, and make sure the graphics are actually drawn on the stage of the loaded swf, and not in any other symbol that is placed on the stage (or you can draw in other symbols but you then have to apply scale9Grid to those) – in the zip file, check scale9GridEx2 for how the swf is loaded and applied scale9Grid, and check scale9GridLoading to see how the loading swf is drawn – very simple actually

scale9GridEx.zip – You will need Flash CS4 or newer to be able to open the fla files

By: shmimpie

shmimpie — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:24:11 +0000

I’ll another failure point that might not be obvious and isn’t really documented (at least I couldn’t find it…)

Let’s say you want to use actionscript to apply scale9Grid to a loaded swf that has vector art on the timeline. Seems like a sensible use case…. It won’t work! Vector drawings are not drawn into graphics instances. For AS scale9Grid to work, it needs to be operating on a movieclip with a non-empty graphics instance that is larger than the applied rectangle.

So, you think, maybe I’ll get cute and draw into a graphics instance in the loaded swf. That won’t work either. As soon as you include both your vector art and code drawing, scale9Grid will barf. Basically, AS scale9Grid, as opposed to the library variety, can’t be applied to a movieclip that contains vector drawings on the timeline.

For me, this makes the feature almost useless. If I can’t easily apply it to a loaded swf, well…

Anyway, giving up. Thanks again for supplying some useful information. The Adobe docs mention none of these limitations. They should go into detail on them, but alas…

By: shmimpie

shmimpie — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:58:55 +0000

Well, congratulations! This is the only useful information on this (non) feature anywhere! The Adobe examples and documentation are horrendous.

Thank you!

By: UncleNinja

UncleNinja — Wed, 12 May 2010 17:33:23 +0000

Holy crap!
This is awesome, Ovidiu! Thanks, man!

By: Ahmed Nuaman

Ahmed Nuaman — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:05:51 +0000

Good write up, it inspired me to write a class that will scale anything, check it out and tell me what you think: http://ahmednuaman.com/blog/2009/06/26/scale-any-displayobject-with-my-scaleobject-class/

By: Ahmed Nuaman — Freelance Designer and Developer — Blog — Scale Any DisplayObject with My ‘ScaleObject’ Class

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:04:07 +0000

[...] Here’s a nice run down of when it works and when it doesn’t work: http://www.ovidiudiac.ro/blog/2009/05/scale9grid-work-and-fail/ [...]