how to disable buttons when another button is clicked

[Guest]

I have an application with 5 buttons that each play or pause different movieclips. How can I prevent other buttons from playing different movieclips when a movieclip is already playing.

[kglad]

you can use the enabled property of movieclips and buttons to enable and disable your buttons.

[Guest]

I looked in the help and found an example actionscript. I changed the button instance names to the button names in my app. I put the actionscript on frame 1 that holds the movieclip being played. Here it is

{
mycase3_btn = true;
mycase1_btn = false;
mycase2_btn = false;

//button code
// the following function will not get called
// because myBtn2_btn.enabled was set to false
mycase1_btn.onRelease = function() {
trace( "you clicked : " + this._name );
};
mycase2_btn.onRelease = function() {
trace( "you clicked : " + this._name );
};
mycase3_btn.onRelease = function() {
trace( "you clicked : " + this._name );
};
}

It doesn't disable the other 2 buttons. As may be obvious I am new to all but the simplest actionscripts. What am I doing wrong?

thank you for your time!

[Ned Murphy]

For what you show, you haven't disabled any of the buttons. If I get the intention right, you should have...

mycase3_btn.enabled = true;
mycase1_btn.enabled = false;
mycase2_btn.enabled = false;

One way to deal with disabling sets of buttons is to have a function that enables/disables them all, as in...

function enableBtns(truefalse){
for(i=1; i<4; i++){
this["mycase"+i+"_btn"].enabled = truefalse;
}
}

Then, for the button functions, first you call the function to disable them all...

enableBtns(false);

And when the movieclip finishes playing you need to have the buttons enabled again... which you can have in the last frame of the movieclip.

_parent.enableBtns(true);