ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Creating a Flash Fill-in Form

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If we give dataSender another property, country, with a value of “Canada”, then

echo.pl creates the string:

output=formInput:theInputValue\ncountry:Canada

3. It returns the string to Flash.

When Flash receives the string from echo.pl, it finds the

output variable and automat-

ically adds a corresponding

output property on dataReceiver. The value of the output

property is the string containing the list of variables we sent to echo.pl.

Obviously, echo.pl is merely a proof of concept. When applied, however, the con-

cept can have interesting and powerful results. For an example of a more fully devel-

oped Perl system, see the flat file database sample available under “Server

Communication” at the online Code Depot.

Receiving Results from the Server

Recall that when we sent the properties of dataSender to echo.pl, we requested that

echo.pl’s return value be stored in the

dataReceiver object:

dataSender.sendAndLoad("http://www.yourserver.com/cgi-bin/echo.pl",

dataReceiver, "GET");

When data is received from echo.pl, Flash executes the callback assigned to

dataReceiver.onLoad( ). We originally assigned that callback inside our initForm( )

function in Example 17-1; let’s take a closer look at it now:

dataReceiver.onLoad = function ( ) {

// Prepare the response clip ...