Jumping to a different URL

To open a web page in a browser window, or to pass data to another application at a defined URL, you can use the getURL() global function or the MovieClip.getURL() method. For example, you can have a button that links to a new website, or you can send Timeline variables to a CGI script for processing in the same way as you would an HTML form. You can also specify a target window, just as you would when targeting a window with an HTML anchor (<a></a>) tag.

For example, the following code opens the macromedia.com home page in a blank browser window when the user clicks the button instance named homepage_btn.

homepage_btn.onRelease = function () {
  getURL("http://www.macromedia.com", _blank);
}

You can also send variables along with the URL, using GET or POST. This is useful if the page you are loading from an application server, like a ColdFusion Server (CFM) page, expects to receive form variables. For example, suppose you want to load a CFM page named addUser.cfm that expects two form variables, name and age. To do this, you could create a movie clip named variables_mc that defines those two variables, as shown below.

variables_mc.name = "Francois";
variables_mc.age = 32;

The following code then loads addUser.cfm into a blank browser window and passes to the CFM page variables_mc.name and variables_mc.age in the POST header.

variables_mc.getURL("addUser.cfm", "_blank", "POST");

For more information, see getURL().