Jesse Stratford

Jesse lives and works in Melbourne Australia. He is the Cofounder of http://ActionScript.org. A Flash enthusiast, teacher, author, freelancer and speaker Jesse's main focus nowadays is managing http://ActionScript.org, but he enjoys participating actively in community and the wider Flash scene when he has time.

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Finally, the submit button. This is the hardest bit, which is indicative of how easy this tutorial really is. We ignore the junk on Line 7 of the HTML above and go back to Line 1 which tells us the method and the action of this form, the two important bits of info for submission. In most cases, the method will be either 'get' or 'post' and the action will be the URL of a processing script. Submission can be performed using GetURL or loadVariablesNum (we'll get to which is best in a moment). The syntax is as follows: 
getURL ("process.php", "", "POST");
// or
loadVariablesNum ("process.php", 0, "POST");

So as you can see, in each case the 'action' is entered into the URL field and the method is chosen from the 'Variables' drop down. Note that in each case POST could be replaced by GET. For those of you who are unfamiliar with these 'methods', they take all the variables on the timeline from which they are executed (in this case the main timeline, _root) and pass them to the URL specified. GET is great for debugging as it will show the variables in the browser URL line, allowing you to check that your variables are being passed correctly. Of course, if you're passing sensitive information this is the last thing you want, so POST is preferable as it does not show the variables anywhere. POST is also preferable if you're passing more than a few hundred characters, as GET has a character limit. For the purpose of this tutorial I have used POST because it's the most common method used in HTML forms so I wanted to be consistent, but you should always use GET until you are sure your script is working, then change to POST. Also note that there are some documented problems with Flash 5 and the POST action, specifically when executed from a Projector presentation.

So which to use? LoadVariablesNum or GetURL? Well this really comes down to two things. Firstly, if the script you're calling processes data on the fly and outputs results to the browser, you will have to use GetURL so that the results can be viewed, as Flash will not interpret them. You can set the window property of your GetURL command to "_blank" if you want to show the data in a new HTML window without taking the user away from your Flash site. If the processing script simply takes data for storage, or addition to a database, etc. and does not require a visual output, then I would use LoadVariablesNum as it allows your script to run in the background without detracting from your neat Flash environment.

As I said before, the GET and POST methods attach variables stored on the timeline from which they are executed. If your variables are within a MovieClip, run the actions from there.

For those of you who are Intermediate level scripters, you can actually make your own routines in Flash which will process your data. The benefit of this is that you could then use Flash to display your output without having to open a new window or what-have-you. Check out the LoadVariables Interaction tutorial in the Intermediate section for more on this.

Jesse Stratford is the Co-Master of ActionScript.org and a freelance Flash developer and teacher. He is based in Australia and enjoys all things Flash.

NB: If you have comments or feedback please feel free to email me, but please do not email me Flash questions; the forums are provided for that purpose and you will get a faster answer by posting you question there.
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