Jumping to a different URL

To open a web page in a browser window, or to pass data to another application at a defined URL, you can use the getURL() global function or the MovieClip.getURL() method. For example, you can have a button that links to a new website, or you can send timeline variables to a CGI script for processing in the same way as you would an HTML form. You can also specify a target window, the same as you would when targeting a window with an HTML anchor tag (<a></a>).

For example, the following code opens the adobe.com home page in a blank browser window when the user clicks the button instance named homepage_btn:

// Attach to frame
homepage_btn.onRelease = function () {
    getURL("http://www.adobe.com", "_blank");
};

You can also send variables along with the URL, using GET or POST methods. This is useful if the page you are loading from an application server, such as a ColdFusion server (CFM) page, expects to receive form variables. For example, suppose you want to load a CFM page named addUser.cfm that expects two form variables, firstName and age. To do this, you can create a movie clip named variables_mc that defines those two variables, as shown in the following example:

variables_mc.firstName = "Francois";
variables_mc.age = 32;

The following code then loads addUser.cfm into a blank browser window and passes variables_mc.name and variables_mc.age in the POST header to the CFM page:

variables_mc.getURL("addUser.cfm", "_blank", "POST");

The functionality of getURL() is dependent on what browser you use. The most reliable way to get all browsers to work the same is to call a JavaScript function in the HTML code that uses the JavaScript window.open() method to open a window. Add the following HTML and JavaScript within your HTML template:

<script language="JavaScript">
<--
    function openNewWindow(myURL) {
        window.open(myURL, "targetWindow");
    }
// -->
</script>

You can use the following ActionScript to call openNewWindow from your SWF file:

var myURL:String = "http://foo.com";
getURL("javascript:openNewWindow('" + String(myURL) + "');");

For more information, see getURL function in the ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference.

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