Controlling Flash with ASP
A recent project has required a few things that I haven ' t doing for a while. One is dealing with Flash-
which I haven ' t done since shortly on the release of Flash 3.0. The other are to actually figure some
Way of getting dynamic content in without using generator. One solution we ' ve come up with involves
Jumping out of a flash movie to an ASP page, then back again. Of course our designers were a little
Miffed, since they ' ve built the Flash movie with all sorts of different transitions
And this solution would mean starting from the opening scene of the movie. It also stank from a
Usability standpoint.
Not so, said I
To accomplish the effect of jumping back in a specific frame, we simply load some variables into the
Flash movie and use them to jump to the right frame. Cool huh?
Initially we had a little trouble, since designers don ' t need to know anything about ASP, so conveying
Information back and forth is a little tricky, but we got there. How it works are like this
In the Flash Movie, the I frame has a piece of ActionScript which simply reads
gotoAndPlay (Scene);
Stop ();
The syntax is slightly different in Flash 4.0-this are Flash 5.0, but you have my drift
Now, when jumping back from the ASP page to the Flash page, we tag a querystring parameter onto the links
Flash.asp?scene=awards
Flash.asp?scene=services
Flash.asp?scene=contact
And so on. The script flash.asp looks something like this ...
<% @Language = "JScript"%><%
Response.Buffer = true; Response.Expires =-1441;
var s = new String (Request.QueryString ("scene"));
Strscene = (s!= ' undefined ' &&s!= ')? s: ' Default ';
%><! DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 transitional//en" "Dtd/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" >
<title>flash control</title>
<body>
<object classid= "clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000"
Codebase= "http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=4,0,2,0"
Width= "750" height= "395" >
<param name= "movie" value= "http://edu.cnzz.cn/NewsInfo/movie.swf?scene=<%= strscene%>" >
<param name= "Quality" value= "High" >
<embed src= "http://edu.cnzz.cn/NewsInfo/movie.swf?scene=<%= strscene%>" quality= "High"
Pluginspage= "http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?"
P1_prod_version=shockwaveflash "
Type= "Application/x-shockwave-flash" width= "750" height= "395" >
</embed>
</object>
</body>
So, if we have the QueryString, it loads the scene ' default '-else it loads whatever ASP tells
it to. Cool huh?
This trick would work from Flash 4.0 Upwards-flash 5.0 are particularly nifty, and I could get-like
It ...
