Take Home Exam #2 - Flash portion ..... due Wednesday, November 21, 5:00PM

3 files for you to download:

1. Flash file with an animated bar chart

2. The XML file which accompanies the Flash file

2. XML file which contains gas prices for each state and the order they appear in if sorted alphabetically or by price

Instructions

1. Import your Illustrator file from the Illustrator portion of the exam (you may find that you need to resize everything if you've made it too large for Flash to handle). Delete the bars in your "gas prices by state" bar chart and the state labels so you can draw them with ActionScript). [NOTE: if you didn't include the bar chart in your design, that's fine, you can just add it for the purposes of this Flash exercise]

2. Add the following functionality

a. Allow the viewer to sort the chart alphabetically by state name or by gas price. Use the model in the flash file you've downloaded and tweak elements one-by-one until you've gotten what you want. Don't let yourself get stuck with this - just keep tweaking one thing at a time to see what happens. Here is my recommended approach for this task:

1. Figure out how to make the bars vertical rather than horizontal (there's a tricky bit where you'll need to figure out how to make them all level)

2. Position the labels below the bars and angle them at 300 degrees.

3. Switch the XML data source. The structure of the gas prices XML file is a little different than the structure of the dorm XML file so you'll need to figure out how to accomodate that.

4. Now that the bar chart is vertical and uses the correct data, incorporate it into your imported file which includes the map and then position and resize the bars so they're where you want them.

b. When you click on or hover over a state on your map, have it highlight the corresponding bar in the bar graph by changing it to a color that highlights it effectively. (Implement this for at last 10 states). HINT: At the end of the Flash file, you'll find some commented code that shows how to find a given bar based upon its name - you can use this to find the bar you need to highlight.

Final product: ----Redesign.fla (the due date is November 21, 5:00PM)