Actionscript Cookbook

11.7. Adding Radio Buttons to a Group

Problem

You want to add a group of radio buttons to your form.

Solution

Add radio button instances and assign them to a group using setGroupName( ).

Discussion

Use the radio button UI component to present several mutually exclusive choices. Radio buttons work best with a limited number of items. For a choice among many items, use a combo box or list box. When you create a radio button, you must assign it a label and, in many cases, some data. The label is the text displayed next to the radio button, and the data is stored for programmatic processing when the radio button has been selected and submitted. Even in cases where the label and data are the same, you should still assign a value for the data. This is because it is good practice to retrieve the value for a selected radio button from its data value, not from its label. You should set these values using the setLabel( ) and setData( ) methods. The label should be a string value, but the data can be of any datatype.

This example shows that the data can be a complex object, which can be stored, used for processing or transmitted to a server when the radio button is selected:

// Create a radio button named myRadioButton0_rb.
_root.attachMovie("FRadioButtonSymbol", "myRadioButton0_rb", 1);

// Set the label so that the radio button displays the text "item 1".
myRadioButton0_rb.setLabel("item 1");

// Assign a data object with id and description properties. myRadioButton0_rb.setData({id: 25, description: ...