Searching outside your limits...

Well, a day before I was struggling to search a movie clip in the FLA library, which also involved a text in it. But having a look at the items in the library, which was almost reaching a number as high as 3000, I thought for a moment, "Is this the only optimized way for a flash developer to find any item in the library, to scroll through each and every item inside the folder and search for the correct one, when there is no linkage given for that in the code?"

Sounds tedious, isn't it? Then after a few discussions with my "Flash Teacher", who is also my Team Lead in the firm where I work, and who is also the major source of encouragement for this blog, I realized life with Flash is not that tough. Applying the following steps reduced a lot of tension which had already taken a good shape after looking at the high number of item list in the library.

1. Press Control+F

2. This window would appear on your screen. Select the "Search in" as current document, "for" as text, and "Text" as whatever the text that you need to find. Now click "find all".

 3. If you would notice the results dialog, you would get all the possible results, which would also include the one which you had been wanting.

Lets add some twist to this search. What if the movie clip that had the text field doesn't lie in the scene 1? How would you reach to it? The solution is the same what you had done just above.

Now, instead of selecting "for" as text, select it as "Symbol".

4. Then you would get a drop down of all the possible symbols present in the library. Just press the starting alphabet of the movie, whose parent movie you want to find, in our case its "m" of "mc_loadingData". Keep pressing "m" till you reach your correct search. Once you reach "mc_loadingData", click on "find all" again.

5. You would get the data of the movie clip that is present in scene 1 and which successively involves the text that you started searching in the beginning.