Deep Link Flex Application Using SWFAddress
If you are writing a web application, a HTML or Flex one, you’d want it to be found, can be bookmarked, can be shared on social networks. If you are developing a Flex site, you’d like to the state of the site, the “pages” of the site to be treaded by search engine, bookmark site or social networks the same way as the HTML contents. This is a different problem than the one concerned about if the Flash based content can be indexed by Google or not (yes, it can). This concern can be addressed by SWFAddress.
SWFAddress is an open source library that provides deep linking for Flash and Ajax. It’s a developer tool, allowing creation of unique virtual URLs that can point to a website section or an application state. SWFAddress enables a number of important capabilities which are missing in today’s rich web technologies including:
- Bookmarking in a browser or social website
- Sending links via email or instant messenger
- Finding specific content with the major search engines
- Utilizing browser history and reload buttons
SWFAddress works with all major browsers, such as Internet Explorer 6+, Mozilla Firefox 1+, Safari 1.3+, Opera 9.02+, Camino 1+, Mozilla 1.8+ and Netscape 8+.
Here is a sample of how it can be used in a Flex application:
<?xml version=“1.0″ encoding=“utf-8″?> <mx:Application xmlns:mx=“http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml” creationComplete=“SWFAddress.onChange=getURL”> < ![CDATA[ private function getURL():void{ var path:String = SWFAddress.getPath(); switch (path) { case “/Home”: content.selectedIndex = 0; break; case “/news”: content.selectedIndex = 1; break; case “/popular”: content.selectedIndex = 2; break; } } private function setURL(event:Event):void{ SWFAddress.setTitle(‘URL Title: ‘ + event.target.selectedChild.label); SWFAddress.setValue(‘/’ + event.target.selectedChild.label); } ]]>
It’s manual and labor intensive way of providing your Flex application with unique internal URLs. In real world, careful planning and coding are needed because you really don’t want this gets in the way of your elegant OO AS3 programming. However, for a business required to feed Google for return, implementing something like this is nothing to do with technology. You just need feel happy that there is something here to help out.
You can check out the live example here.
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Hi, if you’re interested I’ve written a piece of code that integrates SWFAddress and Flex 3’s BrowserManager. You can find it here: http://blog.iconara.net/2007/12/28/deep-linking-in-flex-using-swfaddress-and-browsermanager/