Utility – Deep Copy Panel

Posted on March 24th, 2010 by Jake

Lets say you are an epic flash button maker, and you have just finished your latest masterpiece. This is good news, everyone in the office rejoices, flood waters recede, the hungry get fed, and world peace overcomes the planet. (I wasn’t kidding about epic). Your new piece of hotness is released to the client. They love it, of course. However, no one could have predicted exactly how much they would love it. They have decided to change ALL of the buttons in the project to match the new amazingness. The fear of impending pain courses through every bit of plumbing in your body. How on earth are you going to take all of those carefully placed keyframes, gradient masks, and undocumented flash tricks, and create new buttons that are all slightly different from that epicly complex set of timelines?

The answer? Download our new Deep Copy Panel, thats how.

This panel will allow you to select an item in the library, and make a fully unique copy of all or part of it and all of its children.

Essentially this means you can then take that unique duplicate, go into it, and mess with its innards without causing any ill effects to the original. Using the “include/exclude selected items” radio buttons, you can choose to make a unique copy of everything in the tree, or just parts of the tree.

The image on the left, is how the library started. The image on the right is the result of selecting the “mc_TestSource” library item, and doing a deep copy on its entire tree. As you can see it goes into each child of the MovieClip, and makes a copy of each piece individually. Now you can take “mc_TestSource_new” and do whatever you like with it and not have to worry about what it will do to the original.

Usage
The first thing you need to do to is select one item in the library. Once you have done that, click the “Select library Item” button. This will load that item into the panel and display its hierarchy in the item tree. The currently loaded library item’s name will also be displayed in the text field under that button.

From here you have some choices to make. Firstly, you need to fill in a new suffix and/or prefix. When a unique copy is made, the newly made library items will have the new suffix and prefix in the name.

The next part is optional, but it does allow for a bit more specific control over the copy. With the “Include and Exclude Selected” radio buttons, you can choose to copy parts of the source. This could be useful if you wanted to make a unique copy, but wanted to share a background image for example. You could pick “Exclude Selected” and select the background MovieClip from the tree. Now when you click “Make Unique Copy” all of the items except for the background clip will have unique copies. Therefore if you change the background clip in the new copy, it will also update in the original. If you have Excluded Selected set, and do not have anything selected in the tree, then every child will get a unique copy made, this is the default setting. Conversely if you have “Include Selected” selected, it will only make a unique copy of items that are selected in the tree.

Once all of your options are set, you can simply click “Make Copy” to set things in motion. Please be aware that if you have clips with many layers or a long timeline sequences, this process could take a bit of time. Its also worth noting that the copies will be placed inside of the same folders in the library that the original of the clip resides.

If you are interested in seeing how some of this flash panel stuff is done, please check out our other posts on the subject: Hook Outliner and Hook ReNamer

That about covers it, we hope this will help get a few people a few minutes of their lives back to do something interesting with. As always, if you have any issues or suggestions or whatever, please leave them in the comments of this post.

Good luck!

Actionscript, JSFL, Utilities

8 Responses to “Utility – Deep Copy Panel”

jerseysusa.com says:

December 20, 2011 at 2:16 am

Although a pioneer in the first round out of the cut, but lost 2-4 in the Western semifinals in Seattle, stop in front of the conference finals. At the same time, Olajuwon began to grow as the top center, Sampson injury but played only 43 games. Olajuwon both ends of the court to become a leader, averaged 24.3 points, 11.4 rebounds and 3.39 blocked shots, and get him a team of three consecutive seats in the nation’s first.

Reply
mlb jerseys wholesale says:

December 19, 2011 at 10:13 pm

dear friends, May I say, you are doing a great job here. Well done. I like your words very much. Thanks for your sharing. I just liked your website. Do you have any interest in Wholesale jerseys , if you have, thanks your more sharing.

Reply
Wholesale jerseys says:

October 27, 2011 at 9:49 pm

Thank you for your share very much

Reply
true religion jeans outlet says:

October 14, 2011 at 12:06 am

here’ read a person’s piece of writing , and locate something is advantageous, nevertheless to always be so say the least, I throw a Lv luggage internet site, despite the fact that elements are wide and varied, nevertheless username also love so that you can endorse many.This website involved quite some time so that you can investigate the whole set of observations, however I really love the content article. The application been shown to be extremely helpful . It is often neet when it’s possible to be told and even kept entertained as a result of a great deal of all these outrageous observations

Reply
Olle S. says:

May 18, 2011 at 4:40 pm

Hi! Seems amazing.

But cant get it to work in CS5. Won’t show up in “Other Panels”.

mxp will go in, but don’t show up in Flash.

/olle

Reply
- Jake says:
  
  May 18, 2011 at 4:51 pm
  
  Couple of quick things to check:
  1) If you installed it with flash open, you will need to restart flash
  2) Make sure in the Extension Manager that the panel is “enabled”
  3) See if this file exists: C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Adobe\Flash CS5\en_US\Configuration\WindowSWF\HookDeepCopy.swf
  
  Reply
iPhone App Development says:

February 25, 2011 at 1:37 am

Great post thanks for sharing a informative article keep it up

Reply
ChrisZloty_Blog » (FLASH) Utility – Deep Copy Panel from labs.byhook.com says:

November 8, 2010 at 9:40 am

[...] Essentially this means you can then take that unique duplicate, go into it, and mess with its innards without causing any ill effects to the original. Using the “include/exclude selected items” radio buttons, you can choose to make a unique copy of everything in the tree, or just parts of the tree. The image on the left, is how the library started. The image on the right is the result of selecting the “mc_TestSource” library item, and doing a deep copy on its entire tree. As you can see it goes into each child of the MovieClip, and makes a copy of each piece individually. Now you can take “mc_TestSource_new” and do whatever you like with it and not have to worry about what it will do to the original. (FULL ARTICLE) [...]

Reply

Click here to cancel reply.

Labs.byHook

Flash Scripts, Tools & Methods Developed at Hook

Hook is a digital production company that develops interactive content for industry leading agencies and their brands. For more information visit www.byhook.com.

Utility – Deep Copy Panel

Actionscript, JSFL, Utilities

8 Responses to “Utility – Deep Copy Panel”

Leave a Reply

Most Commented

Categories

Blogroll