Question

Several months ago for a project at work i developed a video player using flash, external interface and swfobject.js. I used external interface to facilitate communication between javascript and actionscript. This works great. Currently I am working on an extension to this that requires me to extrapolate logic from what i already written. I am using the same swf file in both applications, but in the extension i can’t get the flash object to recognize my calls. Since i am using the same swf object i know that my problem is in the javascript, i just don’t know where. I am using the JQuery Library. Without further adieu here’s my code.

At the bottom of my js file i have the following:

$(function(){
     //the video player shouldn't be built until the user presses the div with 'video-btn' class
    $('.video-btn').click(function(){
         var videoplayer = new VideoPlayer();
         videoplayer.addVideoPlayer();
         //external interface function
         videoplayer.player.loadVideo();
    });
});

Here’s the definition for VideoPlayer.addVideoPlayer() and it’s relevant helper functions:

//inside of VideoPlayer object definition
this.addVideoPlayer = function(){
     var that = this;
     $('body').append('<div id="no-flash"></div>');

     //uses swfobject.js to replace the div i just appended with the flash object
     //This works fine.  the flash object replaces the div as intended
     that.embedFlashObject();
     //that.player is (supposed to be) a reference to flash object
     that.player = that.getFlashObject();
};

this.embedFlashObject = function(){
     var that = this;

     //set up all the variables to pass to swfobject.embedSWF

     //this method removes my div and replaces it with an object element that contains the swf file
     //the object tag gets an id which is specified.  Let's assume it's 'vp'
     swfobject.embedSWF(swfFile, 'no-flash', width, hieght, '9.0.0', ... );
};

this.getFlashObject = function(){
     var that = this;

     //this method returns the flash object to make external interface calls on
     //this the method prescribed by swfobject api  
     var videoObj = swfobject.getObjectById('vp');
     if(typeOf videoObj == 'undefined')
     {
          //check if useragent string is IE
          var isIE = navigator.userAgent.match(/MSIE/i);
          videoObj = isIE ? window['vp'] : document['vp'];
     }
     return videoObj;
};

In my $(function(){..}); block, when the command ‘videoplayer.player.loadMedia();‘ I get an error that reads

.loadMedia is not a function.

In the previous version of this project (in which i use the exact same swf file) i do not get this error.

I don’t think i am missing any severe logical errors, and i know its difficult to say definitively ‘this is your issue,….’ when looking at abbreviated and scrubbed code. In lieu of a definite answer i’ll take suggestions as to how to debug this issue. I’ve been playing aorund in the browser console and i’ve found that the ‘player’ attribute of my VideoPlayer object is null. When i ran the same console query against the working version of this project it spits back the object tag. I can’t directly set the object tag, because it will break with the conventions used in the previous version which i need to maintain.

HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Answer 1

So i figured out what my problem was. Despite my best efforts to be robust in description of the problem, i left out one key fact that would probably have helped to solve my issue. I was developing my application locally before moving to an actual development server. When using a flash application in a local context, communications from the internet are disabled by default. If you google ‘adobe security settings’, one of the top links will take you to an adobe security settings page where you can cchose folders on your local machine that you want to allow this external communication. My swf file would tries early on to make a connection to our servers befor initializing the external call backs, if it can’t do that it just waits, and thus none of my functions were becoming declared functions. I actually had this problem when working through my initial iteration of this project, but didn’t think of it until yesterday.

Thank you for everyone who supplied solutions. Having done this twice i can vouch for the fact that everything that has been suggested here is something that might hold a person up while trying to program and external interface flash application.