[18.4] What are some gotchas or characterstics of using a SHARED.DIR?

  1. You cannot move SHARED.DIR castmembers around unless you are currently in the SHARED.DIR file. You can, however, cut and paste them to a different cast location. (but then you have to make sure you haven't referenced the old cast location in the score, because it will not update automatically)

  2. You can have only ONE SHARED.DIR officially, but there is a way around this. (see [18.5])

  3. Anytime something in the SHARED.DIR is moved, and you open one of your other movie files, Director presents you with a dialog box which asks you if you want to update the file to reflect the changes. This is helpful because it also tells how many items were moved.

  4. You can copy and paste cells from the score from one movie file to another, and if the items you have selected are from the SHARED.DIR, Director is intelligent enough not to paste them into the new file when you paste the cells, it simply references the SHARED.DIR cast. This is VERY handy. On the same token, if you copy a cell that contains, let's say, a PICT which is not located in the SHARED.DIR, it will be copied into your new file when you paste the cells. In other words, watch your cast carefully even if you *think* you're pasting only cells which contain SHARED.DIR elements.

  5. The "Switch castmembers" command (command-E) is quite useful for replacing old castmembers in your file with ones located in the SHARED.DIR.

  6. The SHARED.DIR is NOT a good place to put "on startMovie" or "on endMovie" handlers, because these are typically set up differently for each Director file and you don't want to start having conflicts with your "startMovie" handlers within each movie and the SHARED.DIR. Even if you plan on doing the same initialization in each Director file, I've found its better to simply call a handler you've created, and not the built-in "startMovie" and "stopMovie" handlers. This insures that you don't "accidently" create a "startMovie" handler in both places. This is especially easy to do, because Director will only find castmembers "not used in the score" if you do a "find castmembers" and will not highlght movie castmember scripts or SHARED.DIR castmembers. Therefore you won't catch your duplicates by doing a "find all castmembers which are not used in the score."