Flash Quicktime Controller : Javascript To Flex

In my last post we started looking at creating a Flex controller for a Quicktime movie. Specifically we looked at calling javascript functions from Flex using ExternalInterface. This time we'll talk about calling Flex functions from javascript.

As you may remember we called a javascript function after the Flex creationComplete event is fired so the Quicktime movie doesn't load until after the Flex application. Next we'd like to tell the Flex controller that the Quicktime movie is loaded. I'm not going to talk about the Quicktime API in this post so lets assume that there is a mechanism for testing the load state of the Quicktime movie. We have a javascript funtion qt_status which is listening for the Quicktime movie to finish loading. When the load is complete we want it to call a Flex function. For this to work we need to register this event within Flex before it's needed by the javascript function. Once again we'll use the creationComplete event (i.e before we load the Quicktime movie) to register the available functions.

ExternalInterface.addCallback("qt_complete", qt_complete);

As you can see we use ExternalInterface addCallback and send it a string representing the function name to call from javascript (can be different from the actual function name) and the actual Flex function name this refers to. As discussed in the previous post you need to check for the availability of ExternalInterface before adding this callback. Once created you can call this function using javascript, adding parameters if required , like this :

var myFlexApp = document.getElementById('QT_SWF');
myFlexApp.qt_complete(myParam);

For this to work the Flex applications ID needs to be set to 'QT_SWF'. With this done it's really simple to get javascript to communicate with your Flex application. In the next post we'll look at the Quicktime API and using it to interact with our controller.