Anuj @ ColdFusion, Flex and some more….

Flex ExternalInterface

Tagged Under : Flex

In one of my recent projects, I had the requirement to open a browser window from within Flex on click of a button. Thats when I came across this Externalinterface call. Here is how I did it.

private function openWindow():void { ExternalInterface.call("w_ = function () { window.win = window .open('http://yahoo.com','TestPage','width=700,height=500'); }"); }

Dont forget to do this though :-

import flash.external.ExternalInterface;

Might be useful to some of you trying to achieve the same in your project.

| Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Flex

Comments:

8 Responses to “Flex ExternalInterface”

1. radek on 31 Oct 2007 at 12:28 pm #
   
   

   Thats actually nice trick. It will be much more useful for communicationg with JavaScript directly - you can do browser programming from inside Flex.
   You can for example parse location, place divs, add or remove DOM nodes.
   I think you just forgot to mention the most important part is this:

   …call(”w_ = function() {…

   as it triggers JS function execution. And you can’t place var before w_ at it will not work at all.
2. admin on 31 Oct 2007 at 2:57 pm #
   
   

   yes I agree to that. A whole lot of things can be done in terms of communicating with javascript and browser. placing a var before w_ will make it not work because then it will be treated as a flex variable? is that what you wanted to say?
3. radek on 31 Oct 2007 at 5:40 pm #
   
   

   No - I have no idea why it won’t work with var but it doesn’t
4. admin on 31 Oct 2007 at 5:47 pm #
   
   

   nice
5. Amy on 1 Nov 2007 at 8:37 pm #
   
   

   I assume that FABridge will be popular once it’s outta beta status? This is something you would use with it, rather than ExternalInterface?
6. admin on 1 Nov 2007 at 8:45 pm #
   
   

   I havent got my hands dirty yet with the FABridge but from the looks of it, it looks like an interesting library. Thanks for letting me know, I am gonna try some of the examples out there.
7. Amy on 2 Nov 2007 at 5:25 pm #
   
   

   Great! I’ll be awaiting your posts on it! I haven’t played with it much do to not developing in Flex yet, but from what I heard about it at MAX 2007… it sounded like it could be quite useful.
8. Anuj Gakhar on 2 Nov 2007 at 8:17 pm #
   
   

   Sure Amy, I am gonna try it over the next couple days and will post it here once I do that.