Can Flash Professional be automated?

Question

What I want to do is script some flash authoring tasks. The procedural drawing tools (such as the "Deco" tool) suggest that this is possible, as they programmtically generate content which can then be edited. For example, lets say I want to quickly create 90 TextFields arranged in some way and fill them each with one specific letter. This is really easy to do in ActionScript -- but only for generating objects which are displayed at run time. That is, they are created and displayed by the Flash player. I want to create these objects at author-time, the same way VBA code in an MS Office document can automate the creation of the document itself, or the way many applications such as GIMP can be automated with Python scripts.

An alternative would be a way to generate and save swc, swf, or fla files from code. That way I could use ActionScript to, for example, generate some TextFields at run time but then save them to a file which I could then load in Flash Professional and extract and break apart the objects created.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can achieve automation through JSFL.