Flex Snippet - Using FlashVars

One of the many ways of getting information in Flash and/or Flex is using FlashVars which can be passed in through the embedding mechanism. This method is used for many different things. It can be used to pass in a video to play or a simple parameter you don't want to define at compile time. You can see examples of this all over the web in places like Google Finance and YouTube.

Below you can see a small example of an application pulling in information using FlashVars. The color that is displayed is grabbed from the vars. You can also check out the FlashVars Demo Source if you would like. I am going to go over the pieces needed for this just after the demo.

So really it is pretty simple to use FlashVars in Flex, the only thing you need to ever remember is Application.application.parameters the parameters object holds all the key value pairs for the vars coming in. In the demo above I am using the following code to get the favorite color.

That is it. Now the other piece we need to handle this is actually setting the FlashVars in the embed code. If you use swfobject or some other javascript mechanism to add the swf you will have to look in their documentation for adding extra parameters. These are usually very straight forward. As for doing this in the object and embed html tag, well I have an example below.

As you can see above we have added the new param and the object tag and a new attribute in the embed tag. And with that we are done with this short little tutorial, as always feel free to ask questions and voice any other comments. Until next time keep coding and playing video games (they are good for the soul).