Actionscript Cookbook

11.13. Submitting a Form

Problem

You want to submit a form to a URL, such as a CGI script.

Solution

Use a LoadVars object with properties and values corresponding to each element of the form to be submitted. Or, alternatively, write a submitToURL( ) method for the custom Form class to handle this process dynamically for any form.

Discussion

Here are the steps for submitting form data to a URL using LoadVars:

1. Create a LoadVars object.

2. Add a property to the LoadVars object for each form element. The property name should be the name of the form element. For list boxes, combo boxes, text fields, and checkboxes, the property name is the value of the element’s instance name (programmatically, this is the _name property value). For radio buttons, the name of the property should be the group name. The value of each property should be the value of the element as retrieved using the recipes in this chapter.

3. Call the send( ) method of the LoadVars object to send all the properties and values to a specified URL.

Here is a code snippet that uses this process with just a few form elements:

lv = new LoadVars(  );
lv.myListBox_lb       = myListBox_lb.getSelectedIndex(  ).data;
lv.myCheckBox0_ch     = myCheckBox0_ch.getValue(  );
lv.myRadioButtonGroup = myRadioButtonGroup.getValue(  );
lv.send("http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi/getFormData.cgi");

The preceding process is not too taxing, as long as there are only a few simple elements in the form. However, as you add more elements to the form, the process becomes more burdensome ...