Comments on: Passing Variables to Flash with URLs

Question: Passing Variables to Flash with URLs

kirkaracha — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 16:58:04 -0800

How can I change variables in a Flash movie based a URL parameter?

I have some text in my Flash movie, and I want to change it based on a parameter in the URL. For example, if the URL ends with something like ?text=beer, I want the Flash movie to say "beer."

By: niles

niles — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 17:11:26 -0800

Passing Variables to Flash from HTML via Query String
Google Query: pass variables to flash url

By: grumblebee

grumblebee — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 18:20:12 -0800

url variables appear in the _root scope. So if you should just be able to write

textfield.text = text;

By: thinman

thinman — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:59:33 -0800

You probably just want to pass the query string to Flash using javascript, like this.

You can tack the variables onto the movie parameter as in the above example, or use another parameter called flashvars.

grumblebee, query string variables are only available to the _root of a movie if the swf is called directly. If it is in object and embed tags, as it usually will be, stuff from the url won't be available to it. Variables appended to the movie parameter would be, but they'd be static unless built using something like the javascript method above.

By: thinman

thinman — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 20:03:59 -0800

Or you could use SWFObject. I have. It works well. Wish I'd remembered it before posting above.

By: grumblebee

grumblebee — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 21:01:20 -0800

You're right, thinman. I misunderstood the original post. I thought he meant vars appended to the end of the swf url.

By: malevolent

malevolent — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 23:28:27 -0800

Another recommendation for SWFObject, which makes detection, embedding and passing in variables nice and tidy.

For displaying the text, you need to put a Dynamic Text field into the movie, give it an Instance Name, and set it to embed any characters you might need to use (otherwise it won't know how much of your chosen font it'll need to retain). The variable you've passed in will exist in the root of the movie, so if your text field is also in the root you'll just need to use
instanceName.text = variableName;