User Guide

The Flash Document Object Model 15
The Document object
An important property of the top-level flash object is the fl.documents property. (See
fl.documents property.) The fl.documents property contains an array of Document
objects that each represent one of the FLA files currently open in the authoring environment.
The properties of each Document object represent most of the elements that a FLA file can
contain. Therefore, a large portion of the DOM is composed of child objects and properties
of the Document object. For more information, see Document object.
To refer to the first open document, for example, use the statement
flash.documents[0] or
fl.documents[0]. The first document is the first Flash document that was opened during
the current session in the authoring environment. When the first opened document is closed,
the indexes of the other open documents are decremented.
To find a particular document’s index, use
flash.findDocumentIndex(nameOfDocument)
or fl.findDocumentIndex(nameOfDocument)
. See fl.findDocumentIndex().
To access the document that is currently focused, use the statement
flash.getDocumentDOM() or fl.getDocumentDOM(). See fl.getDocumentDOM(). The
latter is the syntax used in most of the examples in this document.
To find a particular document in the
fl.documents array, iterate through the array and test
each document for its
document.name property. See fl.documents and document.name.
All the objects in the DOM that aren’t listed in the previous table (see “The Flash Document
Object Model” on page 14) are accessed from the Document object. For example, to access
the library of a document, you use the
document.library property, which retrieves a library
object:
fl.getDocumentDOM().library
To access the array of items in the library, you use the library.items property; each element
in the array is an Item object:
fl.getDocumentDOM().library.items
To access a particular item in the library, you specify a member of the library.items array:
fl.getDocumentDOM().library.items[0]
In other words, the library object is a child of the Document object, and the Item object is a
child of the library object. For more information, see
document.library, library object,
library.items, and Item object.