Posted by Anthony in Flash, Tutorials, Web Design tagged actionscript 3, aspx, data, design, Flash, PHP

If you are working on any Flash website projects that need to pass data out to an ASPX or PHP file (or any other type of file requiring to send data via POST or GET), you can use the code below.  Note that this code is written in ActionScript 3.

/* --- Begin Code --- */
var firstName:String = "Anthony";

function submitForm(e:MouseEvent):void {
   var varsToSend:URLVariables = new URLVariables();
   varsToSend.firstName = firstName;
   // Insert additional values to send

   // Create URL Request, set to POST, and attach data
   var formRequest:URLRequest = new URLRequest("flash.php");
   formRequest.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
   formRequest.data = varsToSend;

   // Create URL Loader, attach listeners, and load URL Request
   var varLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader;
   varLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onLoaded);
   varLoader.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, ioErrorHandler);
   varLoader.load(formRequest);
}

function onLoaded(e:Event):void {
   // Insert success actions here
}

function ioErrorHandler(e:IOErrorEvent):void {
   // Insert error actions here
}
/* --- End Code --- */

A few notes on the code:

• The submitForm function in this example is called on a MouseEvent.CLICK event (noted with the e:MouseEvent passed into the function).

• If you need to send via GET, change the URLRequestMethod to URLRequestMethod.GET.

• One thing I noticed about the URLRequest was that on the particular domain I was working on, using an absolute URL gave me some bugs.  If I used http://www.myfakedomain.com/flash.aspx, my tests failed on PCs but worked on Macs.  If I removed the “www”, resulting in http://myfakedomain.com/flash.aspx, my tests failed on Macs, but worked on PCs. I don’t know if this was an issue with how the domain was set up (since I only worked on the Flash portion, not setting up the domain) or if it is a Flash URLRequest bug.  Either way, I found that using a relative URL (“flash.aspx”) worked on Macs and PCs, and didn’t throw me any errors.

Hope this sheds some insight on how to send data out of Flash.  Happy coding!