Adding Loading Animation to third party Flash SWF

Question

• I am using flash component (open flash chart 2) to show charts on my webpage.
• The swf file i am using ( open-flash-chart.swf ) is 270 kb.
• It don't have 'loading...' animation in it. so on slow connections, its not showing loading progress.
• Is there any way to add 'loading...' animation to an existing swf file ?
• Eventhough open flash chart is opensource, since i don't anything about flash, action script, i don't want to get into editing its source.

Answer 1

The best way of handling something like this is to create a second SWF that does that loads your SWF. How you go about writing a preloader SWF depends on what tools you have at your disposal, and which player version you are targeting (specifically, what version of ActionScript you want to work with). With AS2 you'll use a MovieClipLoader object, with AS3 you'll use a Loader object. In both cases you'll just listen to a progress event and use that to change the size/scale of a loading bar.