Launch and Edit Flash from Dreamweaver

You can't edit your imported Flash movie file (.swf) directly in the Dreamweaver authoring environment, so you must go to the Flash document (.fla) to make any significant changes to the Flash content. Before Dreamweaver MX, this entailed opening up Flash and navigating through your files to find the source Flash document, which might even be in a different location than the Flash movie placed in Dreamweaver, with no inherent mechanism for tying the two together. You'd edit in Flash, export the .swf, and finally go back to Dreamweaver, hoping that you'd exported to the correct location. This could be a surprisingly time-consuming task on a large site, and even on simpler sites, it could certainly interfere with workflow and add unnecessary steps to what should be an easy routine. Fortunately, since Dreamweaver MX was introduced, we have a simpler method.

After you specify a site for your files to be associated with, Dreamweaver can store basic information about an inserted Flash .swf: most important, its associated source .fla file. This can be viewed in the Src element of the Property inspector. The first time you decide to change an .swf file from within Dreamweaver, you will be prompted to specify the location of the original .fla file, but once you enter this information, it will be stored in the Dreamweaver file. To launch Flash from Dreamweaver, follow these steps:

In your Dreamweaver page, select the .swf you want to edit. Do one of the following:

• Click the Edit button in the Property inspector.

• Right-click (Control-click) the Flash movie placeholder and choose Edit with Flash from the contextual menu.

• Hold down the Ctrl (Windows) or z (Mac) key and double-click the placeholder movie.

If Dreamweaver does not know the location of the .fla file, you will be prompted to supply it. Flash then opens the .fla and you can edit it in Flash as you normally would. The only indication that you are working on a file linked to a file placed in Dreamweaver are the icons at the top of the Document window and the text that says "Editing From Dreamweaver," as shown in Figure 38-5.

Figure 38-5: Editing a Flash file from Dreamweaver

When you are finished editing the Flash movie, click the Done button. Flash exports the Flash movie (.swf), saves the Flash document (.fla), and returns you to the Dreamweaver authoring environment where the modified .swf will be visible in your HTML page.

Tip 

In Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Dreamweaver 8, you can use Design Notes to track any changes made to Flash objects or other media objects originating from Dreamweaver. Search Dreamweaver Help for more information about assigning and modifying Design Notes.