Building Web Forms In Flash - A Fine Balance (
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And
that's about it for the moment. In this article, I demonstrated how Flash could
be used to build simple Web forms to collect user data on your Web site or
within your Flash application. I showed you how to build simple text input
boxes, and link them to a form processing script that does something useful with
the information submitted. I also gave you a crash course in the new form
controls that ship with Flash MX, illustrating how they can be used to build
ever more complicated forms, and how they can be combined with new ActionScript
functions to both submit form data and process the response to dynamically build
a results page.
On a concluding note, it's important to remember that
building a form in Flash is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you get
access to all of Flash's cool animation functions, which make it possible to
build graphically-rich, user-friendly forms rapidly and efficiently; on the
other, the more complicated your forms are, the longer they'll take to download
and render. Flash offers creative developers an immense amount of power - it's
wise to remember that it should be used carefully.
Till next time...be
good!
Note: All examples in this article have been tested on Macromedia
Flash 5.0. Examples are illustrative only, and are not meant for a production
environment. Melonfire provides no warranties or support for the source code
described in this article. YMMV!
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