5 star rating system in actionscript 3 - actionscript-3

Question

i need to build a 5 star rating for a image gallery. when someone rates a image from the gallery i need to retrieve the rating (say like .5 or 2.5 or 3 or 4.5 or 5)
How can we create something like a 5 star rating system in AS 3.0?
Edited:
not the solutions to send the rating vlues to database... I am looking for the logic to set the rating (stars changing the color indicating the rating has been updated) and get the rating values applied...

Answer 1

Now that the question has completely changed, lets look at displaying some stars:
You can use the Polygon tool to create stars. Select this tool and then in properties, select Options and then Star.
Draw 5 stars on a layer.
Convert these to a MovieClip.
Place them on their own layer. Copy them and then place them onto another layer.
Draw a rectangle that will be the color you want to fill the stars with large enough to cover all of the stars. Put this on another layer and then mask that with one of the star layers. Convert the rectangle to a MovieClip so you can tween it.
Create a tween of the rectangle moving from the left to the right so that it slowly covers the stars.
You should have something like this:
Use gotoAndStop() to stop on a desired frame. In my example, 50 is a full 5-star rating. 25 would be a 2.5 star rating and fill 2 and a half stars. Etc.
Old Answer
I'm keeping this here purely for the sake of people searching for things like "rating system in AS3" which will most likely require the below info.
You'll need to store the ratings in a database. The concept I use (and probably that everyone else uses) is that you store records containing a voter, the rating they assigned and what they voted on eg:
Marty | 3 | hat.jpg
John | 5 | hat.jpg
Simon | 1 | tasty-cereal.jpg
You then request all of the records that relate to a given image, combine all of the ratings found and then divide the total you get by the amount of ratings given. This will yield the average which will represent a rating out of 5.
As an example, the rating for hat.jpg could be found like this in PHP:
<?php
$score = 0;
$query = mysql_query("SELECT ratings.score FROM ratings WHERE image='$image_from_flash'");
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($query))
{
$score += $row["score"];
}
$average = $score / mysql_num_rows($query);
echo $average; // This will be sent back to AS3.
?>
To send and receive the ratings, you will need to use URLLoader to communicate with server-side technology, like PHP. This will talk to the database, work out the average as I mentioned above and then send back to AS3 the average rating for you to use.
If you need information about how to work with PHP + AS3 and send information between the two, that's an entirely different question that will require a very detailed answer. You're better off Googling for information about this.
Let me get you started:
Send and load variables with AS3 and PHP

Answer 2

You may want to think about it as a volume slider. for example:
you have a a movie clip of 5 stars that is 100px in width. you make a mask that is 100px wide to cover up the stars. Set up an event listener for MouseEvent.CLICK on the stars movieclip and make the width of the mask whatever the mouseX is relative to the the total width of the clip. something like:
var relativeMouseX:int = mouseX - stars.x; // you'll get a number between 0-100px
so if the value is say 67px then you can do this operation:
67/100 = .67 * 5 = 3.35;
3.35 stars would be the rating.
starsMask.width = relativeMouseX; //makes the mask's width reflect how many stars is showing.