Deep Linking in Flash – SWFObject and SWFAddress

Flash is great, but accessibility can sometimes be a problem if it is not paid attention to. Direct linking, deep linking, back button support, these are very important to wire up in your applications. I am seeing many new RIAs, apps, sites, interactives still not do this and it is quite annoying.

The great thing about the web is that is gave users the ability to control the presentation and the context, from outside the presentation. By allowing users to use the back button and change urls in the address bar this was empowering. Empower your users and ad campaigns to get to different places of your application easily with deep linking, it is required for usability.

But this is hard right? Not really with great tools. What are you waiting for, SWFObject and SWFAddress make up THE platform right now for deep linking, embedding and back button support. These kits have been exhaustively tested and are very compact scripts to help you embed and then provide deep-linking, back button support and direct linking instantaneously almost.

Download SWFObject

Download SWFAddress

Both of these kits are well tested and provide instant small simple components of which to build complex systems on top of. SWFAddress builds on SWFObject tested embedding script and provides the tools you need to get deep linking running in your application in no time.

Note of caution, design implications (architecture design)

When you drive off the URL such as with direct and deep linking in Flash it does change your order of how you handle operations when you have to take into account the URL state. The first thing you have to do is when you receive an onChange event from SWFAddress that the URL has changed, you need to parse it and take action. However if you plan to deep link and provide usability throughout your flash site or app (even in the forms or multistep processes driven by URL) then you need to plan for this event and work this into your architecture for the url handling within the flash framework for your site.

A scenario might be:

1. User using your flash app
2. User clicks link or new section of your flash application
3. INSTEAD of just animating the state in the flash application, you have to just update the section or URL (location.hash in javascript that provides the # name linking allowing the browser to stay put, or in this case SWFAddress.setValue((“/sectionname/page1”)),
4. THEN the flash app or site is REACTIVE to the URL, reads in “sectionname/page1” parses it and then animates to sectionname/page1.
5. Or detect if the change came from the app or the URL directly and handle that differently in the onChange event with a subsystem.

Rather than just animating the app state or changing it, or showing that next photo on the button event, your button event would change the URL, then the flash monitoring the URL would push the onChange event. After that either animate in the next section or take appropriate action per the user requested action.

It isn’t like this for all areas or states of your application but you have to decide what is directly linkable, and when you want a state directly linkable then you have to wire it this way. Obvious choices are navigation items in your site, but they might also be specific cases like a multi-page form wizard that you want to link to step 3 directly, or a movieclip that someone can pass #3m2s to advance the movie by the url. There are many cases where you might want to provide deep linking into your flash application.

I know it sounds complicated? but it really isn’t, just a reversed way of thinking which we will highlight in the future with a tutorial and a fluid flash template. The SWFAddress site has great samples and examples, SWFAddress sets up the onChange handling in these samples and examples of how to do it in AS1, AS2 and AS3 so pick it up.

Download SWFObject

Download SWFAddress

Enable Deep Linking in Flash in 8 lines of code to start with SWFAddress:

From SWFAddress Documentation

1) Insert the SWFAddress script in your page directly after the SWFObject file.

<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject/swfobject.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="swfaddress/swfaddress.js"></script>

2) Include or import one of the provided ActionScript classes. SWFAddress comes with versions for AS1, AS2 and AS3.3) Write your own navigation logic that will be executed when the address is changed.

SWFAddress.onChange = function()
{
    // Your code goes here.
}

4) Call the SWFAddress setter method from every button or action that requires deep linking.

this.onRelease = function() {
    SWFAddress.setValue('/portfolio/');
}

Check out the Asual blog (makers of SWFAddress) for more on good practices and bad practices with deep linking and more tips.Tips like:

Bad Practice: Address values naming using camelCase or other forms of custom convention

SWFAddress samples clearly define the best naming convention for deep links. Web addresses are case insensitive and the standard is lower case. For readability and Google SEO compatibility reasons the convention ‘my-deep-link’ is more appropriate than ‘myDeepLink’ or ‘My_deep_link’. The format http://domain.com/#/my-deep-link/?param=value is the only one fully compatible with the SWFAddress SEO rewriting.

Silverlight Deep Linking

This is also very simple in Silverlight to deep-link using javacript tools kits for Silverlight 1.0 which is javascript only, on location.hash change using a timer you could call an application method that might change the state or call certain transitions or move Canvases around, hide/show them, load content in, etc. Again, something you want to think about early on.

Other notes

SWFObject 2.0 beta5 is out and after 5 betas hopefully is nearing release

Pick up the code here for SWFObject 2.0

SWFObject 2 (script based) is the name again after a small switch and merge with UFO (standards based) to SWFFix but as Geoff Sterns pointed out, this seems to assume that something is broken.

SWFObject 2.0 is the new name again and let’s hope many more great tools are built on SWFObject 2.0 like SWFAddress which handles direct linking and back button support (using location.hash as most AJAX/RIA apps do to get deep linking and back button support).