Comments on: When Flash invokes a Javascript function via GETURL which refers to THIS, what object is THIS pointing to?

Question: When Flash invokes a Javascript function via GETURL which refers to THIS, what object is THIS pointing to?

Danelope — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 11:49:30 -0800

When Flash invokes a Javascript function via getURL which refers to this, what object is this pointing to? [More»]

I'm looking for a means by which a Flash object can affect its own presentation without requiring external code, and this doesn't seem to map to a standard DOM object. For example, this bit of ActionScript:

getURL("javascript:this.style.border='4px solid red';");

should produce the intended effect, but simply throws an error claiming this.style is undefined. I am perplexed.

By: kindall

kindall — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 12:24:37 -0800

"this" refers to whatever DOM object the script is attached to via a handler (e.g. onClick, onMouseOver, onLoad, etc.). As a URL, that script isn't attached to a DOM object.

By: yerfatma

yerfatma — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 15:14:28 -0800

kindall knows (apparently) more about it than I do, but I can back what he's saying: you can't pass this from an anchor tag for some reason that's probably clearly (and sensibly) delineated in the specs. Well, you can pass it, but it doesn't work the way it does with every other element. In my experience.

By: Khalad

Khalad — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 16:45:25 -0800

You could assign the Flash object an ID, and then use something like

document.getElementId('flash').style.border = '4px solid red'

(Caveat: I have not testing this...)

By: BobInce

BobInce — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 17:56:06 -0800

window.

When a method is called, 'this' points to the object the method was grabbed from. This is somewhat odd as it means that unlike in many programming languages:

object.foo();

behaves differently to:

var boing= object.foo;
boing();

If the case like this where 'boing' is called as a function instead of a method, 'this' doesn't get assigned to any object, so it's the global object which for a web browser is 'window'.

So, yeah, forget 'this' and use something along the lines of getElementById.