ActionScript: getURL vs. ExternalInterface - When & Why

This post all stems from a project I’ve been working on very recently, making a drop-down menu in flash, that sits in a HTML page. What we’re talking in relation to here is, getting flash to execute JavaScript DOM functions.

Now, there are couple of ways for Flash to interact with its host page. The first one that springs to mind is getURL(), the same function that enables flash to load webpages. The second requires a little more preparation, and is ExternalInterface.call(). Both have an upside and both a downside. One’s old-school and one’s new-school. There are however, real reasons why you should use one instead of the other in different situations.

getURL

  • getURL takes advantage of the abilities of your browser. After all, http: isn’t the only thing your browser can do. You can (amongst other things) call javascript directly. So, instead of passing a new url through the getURL function, you could pass a javascript function, which would execute on the page. You could, theoretically, pass an entire javascript function as a single string, and execute javascript on your html page - without the function existing in the html.
  • The downside to this is that getURL overrides anything the browser is trying to execute. So, if you’ve got a stack of javascript functions that are executing, getURL will effectively kill them. - Once flash executes the getURL function, kiss your other functions goodbye.

ExternalInterface

  • ExternalInterface is an ActionScript 2 ‘gateway’ for JavaScript / ActionScript communication. As well as it’s ability for two-way communication, ExternalInterface doesn’t kill off other scripts running in the browser.
  • The downside, from a flexibility point-of-view is that ExternalInterface can only call existing functions in either language, it can’t create them on the fly. Which is more secure, I suppose.

So, to summarise:

getURL: Kills running scripts, but doesn’t need a named function to exist

ExternalInterface: Doesn’t kill running scripts, but does need a named function to exist