I’m working on this new site (http://www.saltwatercoralsandfish.com/) in which I’m using this Flash video as a background for the home page; with a CSS (z-index of -1) on the (div) that contains the Flash. Currently I’ve only got the one other content div on the page that welcomes the user and ask them to check back later that the site is being developed. This naturally has a z-index of 0 by default so no extra css is needed. As you can see this content downloads faster than the Flash and shows through the movie intro as it starts and plays. Although this looks ok now, my concern is that when I add other content such as a login control, navigation control, other web parts, etc to the page; it will seriously detract from the Flash video’s presentation.

Is there a way to programaticly hide the controls and web parts until the Flash file has downloaded first and played once? And, how would I code this?

I’m thinking something along the lines of setting the visible property to “false” and then somehow to true once the page’s Flash has played, but I don’t know if this is possible or how to program it. Any ideas and solutions to this issue are greatly appreciated.

I think this would be best done using JavaScript to control the visibility from the client side. Otherwise, you'll need to initiate a postback after the Flash is done playing. I'm not sure how you would do that (not saying it's not possible though). But even if you did it that way, you'll have the issue of the extra round trip and the resulting delay. Client-side JavaScript would not only be instantaneous, it could easily be triggered at the end of the Flash by an ActionScript event.

Thanks for the reply, I was wondering if anyone whould talk with me.

Ya, I think your probably right a postback is not really a good thing here. I was looking into AJAX to maybe solve this design issue. Maybe that would eliminate the need for the ActionScript within the Flash, not sure. Do you know how to code the ActionScript event to be used by the Javascript or trigger AJAX? Have any examples?

again thanks

Gosh, sorry... I haven't programmed in ActionScript since Flash MX, at least 5 years ago. I would be totally rusty on that, but I'm sure your question would be quickly answered on a Flash programmer forum. Or maybe someone else reading this could jump in here.

No problem, thanks anyway. Ya I've got this question out already to a couple other forums, but thought since I'm going to integrate it into the TBH starter kit and try to get all the different web parts to still work correctly, that someone from the Wrox team might help me understand how to do this. So far no luck with that.

anyway thx again.