melbourne chapter

A quick article on using the Flash Shared Object which allows you to ‘persist’ or save a variable that can be retrieved from the flash player when a visitor returns - view here.

In short, we use the shared object like this:

// Create the shared object
mySharedObject = SharedObject.getLocal("myUniqueObjectKey");
 
// Use the object to dynamicall set whichever variables and values we need
mySharedObject.myValueToRetrieveLater =  "Hello World!"; // how corny
 
// Save/Write the Shared Object data to the flash player
mySharedObject.flush();

We read in a value like below:

// Create the shared object again, it will automatically load any of the last flushed values
mySharedObject = SharedObject.getLocal("myUniqueObjectKey");
 
// Trace it to see if we have a value that we wanted to retrieve
trace(mySharedobject.myValueToRetrieveLater);

We could apply this in a lot of ways; one being a log in form, where you may want to remember the last logged in user for accessibility of your website visitor. Ensure that you don’t save the password too though!