August 25th, 2009, by Bodie Leonard
CS4 Flash shared libraries time saver
I am always working on large scale sites in flash and I work with creatives that have a tendency to change their mind every once in a while 
. I needed to come up with a quick solution to change assets quickly across an entire site. Some sites can have at least 20 or more different swf’s and it is way too time consuming to go into each fla library and change that asset. So I started working with shared libraries.
Why have I missed out on this for so long?
Shared libraries are very easy to setup and save soo much time. Here is how I setup my shared libraries.
- Create an .fla that will hold all shared assets for instance sharring an arrow button.
- Create the arrow button then convert that arrow into a movie clip symbol and Linkage it to any Class com.Arrows.
- Then in Sharing check Export for runtime sharing and then input the url where the swf will be published.
- Next create the .fla to where you want to import the shared object.
- Create an empty movieclip that will import the shared object with these properties. Linkage the Class that was used before com.Arrows then in Sharing check Import for runtime sharing and in the URL put the path to the shared library swf.
And that is it. You can now update any of your assets by opening the shared library.swf and BAM! your done. Good luck.
