Serious (and seriously obscure) bug with flash embed code redirects and variables in IE
Haven’t been posting too frequently, been pretty busy at KickApps working on the Widget Studio. I’d like to write about it in another entry at another time but for now I’d like to help expose a pretty vicious bug we’ve encountered during the course of developing this app.
The Widget Studio is a Flex based WYSIWYG widget generator who’s end product is embed code for widgets. The embed src points to a server side redirect that returns our main SWF file with some variables appended to it. These variables have to be dynamic to pass things like the build version number (cache control) and refferal url to the swf. After much debugging we realized if querystring variables are appended to the redirect in <embed src=”"/> then variables attached to the swf from inside the redirect do not get passed to the SWF in IE. After much googling, these are the only 2 entries we could find on the matter:
MSDN forum post
JW Player (?) forum post
If both appended-to-redirect and inside-redirect variables are neccessary, the only viable answer is a rest style architecture to pass variables to your SWF (assuming, like in our case, the appended-to-redirect variables can’t be moved to flashVars as they are used by the redirect script itself)
I may have pulled out the wrong part from the description, but you’re aware that the only reason we have an OBJECT tag is because that’s what Microsoft decided to use years ago, and later pushed through the W3C, right?
I know for awhile IE/Mac used to read the EMBED, and there’s been some confusing talk about “embed” after Silverlight builds started appearing, but if it’s actually in the EMBED, then have you tried putting that data in the OBJECT tag too…?
jd/adobe
Yes indeed though I didn’t mention it above, we’ve been using both object and embed tags, the setup is identical in both regarding parameters being passed.
yeah, i just posted about that recently: http://www.visible-form.com/blog/ie-doesnt-pass-query-parameters-properly-on-file-redirects . Note that this is an issue with IE, not Flash Player.
Luckily we were in a position where we only needed one particular variable in the redirect, so we wound up duplicating the same file with a different name, and using the loaded file name to determine what to do. Other than that, you’re right, you need to build a rest-style url you can parse out to get your vars. At least that’s the only way I know of.
Thanks for the confirmation Rich. If only I had stumbled on your entry earlier it would have saved me some headache. Added your blog to my google reader :)
Thanks for posting this because it verifies exactly what we’ve been dealing with. I’m going to repost on my blog about it.
I made a banner and know i dont know where to put the code so its at the top of my page…help??
_______________
Transport pneumatyczny
I have something that monitors the amount of data my computer downloads at any given moment, and I noticed that when I’m watching a video on youtube or hulu sometimes I start download at around 40kb/s instead of the usuall 100kb/s to 300kb/s causeing the videos to pause.I know the speeds because I have application that tracks how much I’m downloading at present. I though t maybe my bandwidths conjested so during those times that this did happen I tried loading another you tube video or hulu(to rule out the site’s bandwidth problems) and monitoring kb/s. I found that the moment I started another you tube video or hulu video(even the same video). The rate I’d download them would climb up to my normal download speed, but the moment I’d exit out my download rate would go down. Keep in my mind the orginal you tube/hulu video is still downloading/streaming. While I’m testing out my connection with the second you tube/hulu video. I also have an At&t connection, and wondering if this is something weird with At&t
___________________
Dentysta