How to Get the Current Page's URL into Flash


By daniel - Posted on 18 January 2008

This little trick allows a Flash movie (swf) to find out the URL of the page in which it's embedded. After wondering about this for some time, I finally found a blog post with the solution. Here's the key bit of code:

import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
 
var pageURL:String =
	ExternalInterface.call('window.location.href.toString');

This could be useful if you're using the query string in the URL to keep track of the application's state. However, the solution comes with one caveat: Javascript must be enabled for this to work. The Actionscript 3.0 documentation says that if the window.location.href.toString method doesn't return a value then ExternalInterface.call will return null. Same thing happens when Javascript is disabled.

Here's the original blog post by Abdul Qabiz: How to get URL query-string variables within Flex application