Every once in a while we come across something in Flash authoring that doesn’t work quite right… For example not being able to select a few symbols and swapping them with a different one from the library.

We can’t blame Adobe for this though since they can’t possibly think of everything, and they gave us the means to extend Flash’s capabilities using JSFL. If you’ve never heard of it, JSFL (Java Script Flash) is a javascript API that can be used to make the Flash authoring do whatever you want programatically.

So we had the need to swap something like 30 symbols on the stage with a different one from the library, and once you select more than one symbol the little ‘Swap’ button in the properties panel gets grayed out. We could select each one and swap it individually, but that would take waay too long… So I wrote a small script to do this, and thought I might as well post it here for everyone to use.

It’s super easy to install, just double click the MassSwap.mxp file and it’ll be added to Flash’s commands list (via the extension manager).

Once you’ve installed it you can use it like so:

1. Select a bunch of items in Flash
2. Select an item in the library to swap them with
3. Run this script (Commands -> MassSwap) and behold the magic