FlashVar Purgatory
October 15, 2007 11:58 AM
FlashVars & "GET" style URL encoding - help?!
I have a website that features a really simple Flash movie which contains an FLV player that is driven by a Tree component, which has its entries defined by an XML file. This is all fantastic, really easy, was not that hard for me to code/design/setup by viewing a few tutorials...
However, the time has come to expand the capacity of this Media page. I need to modify the Action Script to accept a Flash Variable that is provided IN AN URL like this:
The normal page is foo.com/foo.html
I want to link to this page with an url such as foo.com/foo.html?videoPlayer=thisfile.flv
With the intended functionality being that when the page is rendered the SWF file interprets the string and performs the correct action.
You'd think this would be simple, but I cannot find suitable instructions on how to do this. I have found a thousand different solutions to encoding these flashvar calls in the OBJECT and EMBED sections of the HTML in which the SWF is rendered, but this is not what I want to do. The HTML for the page has to remain static.
It doesn't help that I'm not much of a coder, but I think I can do it with a slight shove in the right direction! Flash experts, hope me!
I have a website that features a really simple Flash movie which contains an FLV player that is driven by a Tree component, which has its entries defined by an XML file. This is all fantastic, really easy, was not that hard for me to code/design/setup by viewing a few tutorials...
However, the time has come to expand the capacity of this Media page. I need to modify the Action Script to accept a Flash Variable that is provided IN AN URL like this:
The normal page is foo.com/foo.html
I want to link to this page with an url such as foo.com/foo.html?videoPlayer=thisfile.flv
With the intended functionality being that when the page is rendered the SWF file interprets the string and performs the correct action.
You'd think this would be simple, but I cannot find suitable instructions on how to do this. I have found a thousand different solutions to encoding these flashvar calls in the OBJECT and EMBED sections of the HTML in which the SWF is rendered, but this is not what I want to do. The HTML for the page has to remain static.
It doesn't help that I'm not much of a coder, but I think I can do it with a slight shove in the right direction! Flash experts, hope me!
SWFObject can take care of this for you. You'll want to use something like:
posted by thinman at 1:25 PM on October 15, 2007
so.addVariable("flashvar1", getQueryParamValue("queryvar1"));posted by thinman at 1:25 PM on October 15, 2007
Another vote for SWFObject, it'll neatly handle detection, embedding, reading the value from the query string, and passing it into the Flash movie.
posted by malevolent at 3:08 PM on October 15, 2007
posted by malevolent at 3:08 PM on October 15, 2007
This thread is closed to new comments.
Alternately, you could use DOM manipulation to add the value to the object/embed tags when the DOM becomes available. In this scenario, you are using JavaScript to format the object/embed tags "on-the-fly" to the format you've seen in the tutorials you mention.
posted by drinkspiller at 12:10 PM on October 15, 2007