BossClick

Standard banner advertisement clickTag button generator and border creator. Actionscript 3.

Usage

Import the BossClick class into your Flash(.fla) file.

import com.thebannerboss.utils.BossClick;

Instantiate an instance of the BossClick class. loaderInfo and stage are part of the flash.display package. So, if you instantiate BossClick from within an .fla file, the loaderInfo and stage classes are naturally inherited and available to pass into the BossClick class.

var bossClick = new BossClick(loaderInfo,stage);

Add the instantiated BossClick object to the display list so it will appear on screen.

addChild(bossClick);

To add an invisible button which covers the entire ad and links out to a URL set by an external clickTag, call the addClickTagBtn method.

bossClick.addClickTagBtn();

Finally, if a border is desired, call the addBorder method and pass in the desired parameters. The first parameter is the thickness of the border in pixels. The second parameter is the Hex Code for the border color. If no parameters are passed in, a two pixel, black border will be added.

bossClick.addBorder(3,0x0000FF);

Here is a complete code block showing how to use BossClick.

import com.thebannerboss.utils.BossClick;

var bossClick = new BossClick(loaderInfo,stage);
addChild(bossClick);
bossClick.addClickTagBtn();
bossClick.addBorder(3,0x0000FF);

Notes on clickTag Filtering

What is a clickTag? A clickTag is a commonly used method of passing in a URL from an HTML page into a .swf file that resides on that HTML page. This approach allows the website which hosts the banner to set the destination of the banner's click-through without having to actually change any of the code in the banner ad.

While using the Flash Player's native method to open links in browsers works most of the time when using the industry standard clickTag approach, it occasionally fails when certain browsers mistake the action as a call to open a pop-up window. To account for this possibility, BossClick checks to see what browser the ad banner is in. If the ad is in a potentially troublesome browser, BossClick will use ExternalInterface to open the URL set by the clickTag.