As you grow as a developer you will undoubtedly be asked to develop more intensive Flash applications. One such application could be a multi-page form. Here's the scenario: your client wants to be able to collect detailed user data and the client wants it to be as painless as possible to the user. Translation: the form needs to maintain state so that the user doesn't have to re-enter all that detailed info in case a connection is lost, a computer crashes or the user chooses to start now and finish later. And of course, the client wants to receive all that data once the user has completed the process. Now while there are several ways you could accomplish this, I want to focus on making use of Flash's SharedObject.

If that's your first time hearing that term, my good buddy, Jesse Stratford, has written an excellent tutorial that lays the groundwork for what we're about to cover here. Click here to read Jesse's tutorial.

Now, what we are going to do is take advantage of the power that Flash lays at our feet by using a SharedObject to maintain state and a couple of LoadVars to handle data transmissions. First thing we want to do before even opening Flash is to map out the requirements and all the data we'll need to collect. By doing this it will decrease the amount of time to code because we'll have a handy desktop reference to look at while coding. For example you could make a chart like:

Data Type    Flash Variable  PHP/JSP/ASP Variable
text               firstname         fname
etc...

Once that's done we're ready to head over to Flash.