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flash.external.ExternalInterface example

Friday 16 September 2005  –  Filed under: Flash  –  3 Comments

An exciting new feature introduced with the Flash 8 Player is ExternalInterface. This feature allows you to communicate seamlessly between Flash and its container, usually the browser. I put together a simple example to demonstrate how ExternalInterface works.

Basically, ExternalInterface.call enables Flash to call a function in Javascript, while Javascript can just as easily access functions within your Flash movie.

No more getURL("javascript:.."), fscommand or setVariable hassle!

I can hear some of you think: “Can’t be that easy, bet it won’t work with Firefox or Safari.”. Well, it really is that easy. All major browsers support ExternalInterface. IE uses ActiveX technology to support it; Firefox and Safari (1.3+) rely on the NP Runtime API.

Enough text, here’s a simple demo:

Download the source files (both Actionscript and HTML/Javascript file are included) to see how this demo works.

This entry was posted on Friday 16 September 2005 at 14:25 and is filed under Flash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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