For convenience when drawing common shapes such as circles, ellipses, rectangles,
and rectangles with rounded corners, ActionScript 3.0 has methods that
draw these common shapes for you. These are the
drawCircle()
,
drawEllipse()
,
drawRect()
,
and
drawRoundRect()
methods of the Graphics class.
These methods may be used in place of the
lineTo()
and
curveTo()
methods.
Note, however, that you must still specify line and fill styles
before calling these methods.
The following example recreates the example of drawing red, green,
and blue squares with width and height of 100 pixels. This code
uses the
drawRect()
method, and additionally specifies
that the fill color has an alpha of 50% (0.5):
var squareSize:uint = 100;
var square:Shape = new Shape();
square.graphics.beginFill(0xFF0000, 0.5);
square.graphics.drawRect(0, 0, squareSize, squareSize);
square.graphics.beginFill(0x00FF00, 0.5);
square.graphics.drawRect(200, 0, squareSize, squareSize);
square.graphics.beginFill(0x0000FF, 0.5);
square.graphics.drawRect(400, 0, squareSize, squareSize);
square.graphics.endFill();
this.addChild(square);
In a Sprite or MovieClip object, the drawing content created
with the
graphics
property always appears behind
all child display objects that are contained by the object. Also,
the
graphics
property content is not a separate
display object so it does not appear in the list of a Sprite or
MovieClip object’s children. For example, the following Sprite object
has a circle drawn with its
graphics
property,
and it has a TextField object in its list of child display objects:
var mySprite:Sprite = new Sprite();
mySprite.graphics.beginFill(0xFFCC00);
mySprite.graphics.drawCircle(30, 30, 30);
var label:TextField = new TextField();
label.width = 200;
label.text = "They call me mellow yellow...";
label.x = 20;
label.y = 20;
mySprite.addChild(label);
this.addChild(mySprite);
Note that the TextField appears on top of the circle drawn with
the graphics object.
