Jesse Stratford

Jesse was born and raised in Australia, and now lives in London. He is one of the original founders of http://ActionScript.org, and was formerly a Flash developer, teacher, author and speaker. While Jesse no longer works as a full-time Flash professional, he still enjoys actively participating in the http://ActionScript.org community as time permits.

View all articles by Jesse Stratford

Difficulty Level: Beginner
Requirements: Flash 5 and above. If you have code which you use repeatedly across multiple files, you can save time by writing it once and using the include action. This action is also very useful when working as part of a team or on large projects, as large amounts of scripting in the Actions Panel can reduce Flash's performance (at edit time).

You can write your script in any plain text editor and save it with .as extension (recommended but not necessary).

To include the code in your external source file use:

#include "myscript.as"
Note that the include action takes place at publish time so if you change the contents of your .as file you must republish the SWF for the changes to take effect. This means you don't need to upload your .as file to your web server for the SWF to work. Also note you may not have comments or a semicolon on the same line as an include command.