Comments on: Flash 8: Using ExternalInterface

By: Geoff

Geoff — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 22:29:07 +0000

Joshua:

It looks like it’s an issue that has already been discovered by others.

The livedocs page has a workaround someone posted down towards the bottom of the page:
ExternalInterface Livedocs

By: Geoff

Geoff — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:00:07 +0000

Yeah it should be no diffrent at all.

By: Xtian

Xtian — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 20:53:25 +0000

Geoff, danforth sent me over here for some help with the ExternalInterface. I’m trying to get this to work with sourced .js files instead of having to embed the JavaScript right in the script tags. Have you gotten this working yet? If so, what do you have to do differently?

By: Joshua Drake

Joshua Drake — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 00:43:08 +0000

Code sample:

By: Joshua Drake

Joshua Drake — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 00:42:03 +0000

By: Joshua Drake

Joshua Drake — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 00:41:04 +0000

Stupid comment system, or just bad documentation:

By: Joshua Drake

Joshua Drake — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 00:38:59 +0000

Great, but there is a bug, with either IE or the Flash object in IE when using ExternalInterface. This is especially problematic with .NET applications since the all but make you sacrifice a small animal to remove the tag, and the JS that Flash inserts into the page excutes before the object has been loaded into memory. The following code will illustrate the issue:




	
	

g the <object> outside the form, and using JS to position it on page load, there is no work around for this issue.

By: Joshua Drake

Joshua Drake — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 00:37:04 +0000

Great, but there is a bug, with either IE or the Flash object in IE when using ExternalInterface. This is especially problematic with .NET applications since the all but make you sacrifice a small animal to remove the object> outside the form, and using JS to position it on page load, there is no work around for this issue.

By: Jose Carlos

Jose Carlos — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 10:05:07 +0000

Does anybody know how to say applications writings in Laszlo (* .lzx) and compiled for SWF 8 they can be used of this API?

By: Geoff

Geoff — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 19:00:15 +0000

Yes, you could pass the XML into a Flash movie, but you don’t need to - Flash has a built in XML loader that can load XML data the same way XMLHttpRequest does.

By: Jose Carlos

Jose Carlos — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 18:39:14 +0000

swf share data with each other?
————————————
have an application AJAX, in her I use the object XMLHTTPREQUEST to request the datasets ” XML ” of the server. Is it possible with this API an application SWF access this dataset or the javascript to pass the reference of the dataset for the application SWF?

By: jd

jd — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 18:52:20 +0000

“Macromedia also has a few examples now avaialable from their labs website. ”

Macromedia released Flash 8 with several examples in their documentation, and also include sample FLA files with the program (see the install folder and then click Samples and Tutorials / Samples / ActionScript.

By: dan

dan — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 14:59:40 +0000

we are using externalInterface with c#
while we can get messages back and forth, we are having problems when we make a class for the communications
is there a scope issue when you make a class for externalInterface functionality?
it doesnt seem to like to communicate with other objects or raise events
or am i doing something wrong?

By: Geoff

Geoff — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 23:32:06 +0000

I was going to, but I seem to have lost the fla files for this entry.

All the code that was used is in the post, though, so you can rebuild the example fairly easily.

Macromedia also has a few examples now avaialable from their labs website.

By: shirley65

shirley65 — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 23:28:18 +0000

“Unfortunately, I can’t release the source fla file until Flash 8 is released”
May I ask you if you relased the source (now that Flash has been released)?
Many many thanks
Shirley

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 19:54:49 +0000

I’m having an awful time trying to get javascript to call my actionscript functions. I’m using AS2.0 and the ExternalInterface class is only called from one object. Has anyone else been using EI in an OOP setting and gotten it to work? Also, when passing strings from flash to javascript, I’m finding that the information never gets there unless I limit the string to the first 100 or so characters. This seems like more of a limitation than others have been discovering. Any ideas that would help with either of these problems would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

By: Geoff

Geoff — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 19:24:29 +0000

I’m not too familiar with stuff like that, but since there’s already been a C# wrapper written, I don’t see why you couldn’t use other technologies.

By: dan

dan — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 19:05:28 +0000

will this work for standalone applications also…like .net?

By: Xander's Blog

Xander's Blog — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 07:00:16 +0000

Flash 8: Using ExternalInterface

By: Geoff

Geoff — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 15:52:18 +0000

There was just a giant discussion about ExternalInterface on the OSFlash mailing list that covered many of the inner workings of it. To answer your questions, Mike Chambers posted this, which says:

It handles serialization with Flash / JavaScript communication. If you want Flash ->c# communication, then you will need to deserialize the XML that Flash will spit out (xml-rpc like xml).

So as for data types, when your movie is in the browser, the Flash player will handle the serialization of data types. As for the amount of data you can send, there may be some more information in the discussion on the OSFlash list.