Panning and scrolling display objects

If you have a display object that is too large for the area in which you want it to display it, you can use the scrollRect property to define the viewable area of the display object. In addition, by changing the scrollRect property in response to user input, you can cause the content to pan left and right or scroll up and down.

The scrollRect property is an instance of the Rectangle class, which is a class that combines the values needed to define a rectangular area as a single object. To initially define the viewable area of the display object, create a new Rectangle instance and assign it to the display object’s scrollRect property. Later, to scroll or pan, you read the scrollRect property into a separate Rectangle variable, and change the desired property (for instance, change the Rectangle instance’s x property to pan or y property to scroll). Then you reassign that Rectangle instance to the scrollRect property to notify the display object of the changed value.

For example, the following code defines the viewable area for a TextField object named bigText that is too tall to fit in the SWF file’s boundaries. When the two buttons named up and down are clicked, they call functions that cause the contents of the TextField object to scroll up or down by modifying the y property of the scrollRect Rectangle instance.

import flash.events.MouseEvent;
import flash.geom.Rectangle;

// Define the initial viewable area of the TextField instance:
// left: 0, top: 0, width: TextField's width, height: 350 pixels.
bigText.scrollRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, bigText.width, 350);

// Cache the TextField as a bitmap to improve performance.
bigText.cacheAsBitmap = true;

// called when the "up" button is clicked
function scrollUp(event:MouseEvent):void
{
    // Get access to the current scroll rectangle.
    var rect:Rectangle = bigText.scrollRect;
    // Decrease the y value of the rectangle by 20, effectively
    // shifting the rectangle down by 20 pixels.
    rect.y -= 20;
    // Reassign the rectangle to the TextField to "apply" the change.
    bigText.scrollRect = rect;
}

// called when the "down" button is clicked
function scrollDown(event:MouseEvent):void
{
    // Get access to the current scroll rectangle.
    var rect:Rectangle = bigText.scrollRect;
    // Increase the y value of the rectangle by 20, effectively
    // shifting the rectangle up by 20 pixels.
    rect.y += 20;
    // Reassign the rectangle to the TextField to "apply" the change.
    bigText.scrollRect = rect;
}

up.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, scrollUp);
down.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, scrollDown);

As this example illustrates, when you work with the scrollRect property of a display object, it’s best to specify that Flash Player or AIR should cache the display object’s content as a bitmap, using the cacheAsBitmap property. When you do so, Flash Player and AIR don’t have to re-draw the entire contents of the display object each time it is scrolled, and can instead use the cached bitmap to render the necessary portion directly to the screen. For details, see Caching display objects .