Ted On Flash: Fun with Intervals

Fun with Intervals

DIGG IT! 8 Comments Published Tuesday, November 30, 2004 at 1:00 PM .

There are several tricks to working with Intervals that makes them easy to manage and change.&

The ids for intervals are numbers globally in the player. When you create an interval with setInterval, it returns a unique id for the interval you set starting with 1 and iterating higher.

myInterval = setInterval(function(){trace('I1')},100)
trace(myInterval) //1

myInterval = setInterval(function(){trace('I2')},100)
trace(myInterval) //2

myInterval = setInterval(function(){trace('I3')},100)
trace(myInterval) //3

//clearing the intervals you have set it even easier.

clearInterval(1)
clearInterval(2)
clearInterval(3)

Another interesting patterns is creating a generic Interval function that you can add functions into. The following function will attempt to execute every object stored within the function.

intervalCore = function(){
var self = arguments.callee
for( var x in self) self[x]()
}
myInterval = setInterval(intervalCore,100)

intervalCore.one = function(){trace('one')}
intervalCore.two = function(){trace('two')}
intervalCore.three = function(){trace('three')}

//delete the items in the interval:

delete intervalCore.one
delete intervalCore.two
delete intervalCore.three

Or if you simply want to clear out all the Intervals within the Flash Player:

i = setInterval(function(){},100) + 1
while(i--){
clearInterval(i)
}

Cheers,

Ted ;)

8 Responses to “Fun with Intervals”

# Anonymous November 30, 2004 2:29 PM

Great post! Nice to see cool stuff like this every now and again. Thanks for sharing, I will use this bit of code to some work, because I was felt that intervals where a pain to deal with.

John
# Ted Patrick November 30, 2004 2:45 PM

It might be nice to roll some of this functionality into a higher level Interval class to make intervals easier to work with.

Interval.add( name, function , delay, props)
Interval.remove( name )
Interval.removeAll()
Interval.start( name )
Interval.startAll()
Interval.stop( name )
Interval.stopAll()
Interval.list() //returns interval data

Cheers, ted ;)
# Anonymous December 1, 2004 9:23 AM

Gret discovery on the auto incrementing globals. Removing all intervals should be a handy debugging technique.

-will
# Anonymous December 3, 2004 8:02 AM

Kenny Bunch just released his IntervalManager class over at his blog. May be exactly what you mentioned in your previous comment...

~mRay
# Anthony August 7, 2007 6:29 AM

You just absolutely made my day. That clear all intervals snippet was essential for a program I was running that would load the same flash file at various difficulties. You rock. :)
# Superscript Films October 30, 2008 11:04 AM

That clearInterval code snippet fit perfectly into my project. Thanks for sharing, I sincerely appreciate your help!!
# Daniel December 9, 2008 2:54 PM

Serious....THANK YOU.
# Anonymous September 11, 2009 7:45 AM

Thanks, great help.

Ted Patrick - Demos & MAX @ Adobe Systems

Note: This is the personal blog of Ted Patrick. The opinions and statements voiced here are my own.

Fun with Intervals

8 Responses to “Fun with Intervals”

Where to find me:

Latest

Lists

Links

Jobs

Archives