Featured Flash FLA 11261 Flash Movies | 1 New Flash Movies Added What's New | Top 100 Featured FLA » Author: DamIRFiVE100 » Title: Circular Menu » Description: Another idea for cool menu. » More by DamIRFiVE100 Random FLAs | Add Flash Movie Featured Flash Site 6325 Flash Sites | 0 New Flash Links What's New | Top 100 Flash Site Featured Site » Posted in the Flash Kit Links section » Title: Passinglane » Comments: Since 1996 Passinglane has been providing compelling communication products for business, enterainment and education. Random Links | Add your own Flash Related Links

1212 Tutorials 7 New Tutorials Added! What's New | Top100 » How to Make 3D Wall Flash Photo Gallery » How to Make Personalized Multimedia Flash eCard in PowerPoint » How to Create Grown up Christmas List Photo Story » How to convert Youtube video(online SWF file) to video for portable devices? » How to Make Flash Christmas Quizzes with Sounds & Videos » FLV to PSP - How to convert YouTube video to PSP for mac » Creating widgets fast and easily with SPAS 3.0 » How to Let PowerPoint Memorize like Man » How to insert YouTube video (Flash video) into PowerPoint » Unknown Tag: Title10 Random Tutorial | Add Site

BBM.net - Music Solutions for Designers BBM.net is designed to save you time and deliver the highest quality royalty-free music for your multimedia projects. Features include: over 450 Music Loop Packages from some of the best composers in the business, our music search engine to speed your selection process, alternate music versions & bonus sounds to use for rollovers or transitions, free technical support and free consulting. Click here for details »

Flash Development Aquent US-WI-New Berlin Post A Job | Post A Resume

Tutorials Home What's New Top Rated Submit myTutes Random!

Tutorials » Actionscripting/Basic

The easiest way in the world to pass information INTO a Flash
Author: Tiran Dagan | Website: http://www.TiranDagan.com |

How to avoid the problematic FScommand and pass info into a Flash movie

Introduction

The only documented way to communicate with Flash is by way of the FScommand. This requires browser support of communication with Flash and is very problematic. In fact, a close examination at the Macromedia Browser support matrix (Look Here) reveals that this method does NOT work with Netscape v 3 & 4 for Mac 68K and Windows 3.1, does not work with any version of Netscape 6.x and does not work with any version of IE for the MAC. There is however a secret trick that can allow you to send information to the flash film from any page, or form. You could even create a SWF file which acts as a form processing page. Wow!

I can’t take the suspense. Here’s what we will do: We will pass the information that we want to deliver to the movie to the containing HTML page. How that information arrives does not matter. It could be by a TYPED=”HIDDEN” form field, or a parameterized URL such as this:

http://www.domain.com/container.html?param1=param1&param2=param2

The trick is to pass it on from the page to the SWF. After you read all of my rubbish you will realize how easy that is. But for now I would like to concentrate on what you could accomplish:

1. Controlling the movie play – How about setting up a Movie that can handle various user selections, and having links from different pages that affect the way the movie plays after it is loaded. For example: http://www.domain.com/container.html?targetframe=7
2. Passing form information- How about a html form page that returns a confirmation page written in Flash that displays the user’s selections?
3. Platform control function – How about browser detection, which is impossible within flash? What if you detected the user is running on a slower Mac and could pass a parameter instructing the film to play at a frame rate of 12 fps instead of 24 fps?

The list is endless and you get the idea. The problem is cross platform compatability: How do you do this without FScommand which does not work with all browser and requires ActiveX technology or other evil things (see this article).

» Forums
	More help? Search our boards for quick answers!

Please rate this tutorial, 10 is the top rating, you can also click the comments link to read/write a review.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1