Send Mail with PHP, ASP, or Perl

Assuming your flash IDE is open already let's go ahead and get started. In this tutorial we'll cover sending emails through flash using a server side script in ASP, PHP, or Perl we will cover all three. With this you can add email functionality to your flash website for endless possibilities. There are a few things to note here. It is a very wise choice to restrict some aspects of this application. Allowing users to decide where the email is going can lead to some serious headaches. By giving users that ability you open yourself to the user using it for anonymous emails, so be careful.

So, with that being said, let's get started. In Flash, we can do this all in one frame. We're going to keep it simple. Let's create 3 input text boxes and 1 dynamic text box. This part is actually important because not using instance names can cause some confusion, so don't forget instance names. Create the first text box and give it the instance name of "subject_txt". Next let's create another text box and call it "email_txt", again create the 3rd input text box and call it "message_txt". Make sure you set this text boxes property to multiline. Now create a dynamic text box and call it "status_txt". Now create a button and give it a name of "submit_btn". You should have something that looks like this:

Now let's open up the Actions panel and start typing some codes. We'll be doing a few things here. I won't be able to explain every detail about everything used because this tutorial would be way too long. We're simply going to use a flash object called "LoadVars". We're also going to surround the whole thing inside an "onRelase" function for the submit button. We will also do some data validation. Also note, there is some extra code, simply for the sake of this tutorial that will allow you to decide whether to use the ASP, PHP, or Perl file. Here's the code

/* For this tutorial this variable will hold which server-side file you wish
 to use.   For ASP, set serverLang = "asp", for PHP, 
set serverLang = "php"   And for Perl, set serverlang = "cgi"   This is for this tutorial.
 In your application this feature wont be required.
  */
var serverLang:String = "asp"; //Create a loadvars object named email_lv
var email_lv:LoadVars = new LoadVars(); //this function is called when email_lv loads the server-side script.
email_lv.onLoad = function(success) {
 //If the script was successfully loaded, this condition is run
 if (success) {
  /* Though the server-side script was loaded, it does not mean it was 
      executed successfully. This condition gets a response from the
   server-side script and determines if it was truly successful. */
  if (email_lv.server_mes == "ok") {
   status_txt.text = "Email Sent";
   /* You can add additional code here. This is only run
      if everything went as planned. */
  }
 } else {
  //email failed to send, but script did load. Likely a server issue.
  status_txt.text = "Email Failed";
 }
}; /*This is the onRelease function for "submit_btn" button. This is only run
  if the button was pressed. */
submit_btn.onRelease = function() {
 /* Here we are validating the data. This insures the email address contains
    both the "@" and ".", If not, it stops the script and alerts the user. */
 if (!email_txt.length || email_txt.indexOf("@") == -1 || email_txt.indexOf(".") == -1) {
  status_txt.text = "Invalid Email.";
 
 //This validates the subject line contains text
 } else if (!subject_txt.length) {
  status_txt.text = "Missing Subject";
  
 //This validates the message body contains text 
 } else if (!message_txt.length) {
  status_txt.text = "Missing Message";
  
 //If everything is filled out correctly, this is run. 
 } else {
  //Collects the data from the text boxes and gives it to email_lv
  email_lv.email_txt = email_txt.text;
  email_lv.subject_txt = subject_txt.text;
  email_lv.message_txt = message_txt.text;
  
  /* Finally, send the data to the server and get a response. 
     As mentioned above, serverlang holds the file extendion for
     the server side language. You can hard code the complete file name. */
  email_lv.sendAndLoad("SendMail."+serverLang, email_lv, "POST");
 }
};

You can make any required additions to fit your project, but you get the idea. Now let's move on .


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