Using Cookies in Flash

Okay, so we've all seen those sites that log your IP, tell you what system your PC is running and other odd details. There is a tutorial in our php section, that teaches you how to gather users information. Here however we are going to take a basic cookie written with JavaScript and will write the cookie info into Flash.

Here is the "raw" data that the script below generates for us:

Now to do this cut a copy the script below and paste it into a html file. Then test it. You should get a list the same as the one above.

Into Flash

Okay we've now got the browser writing out the details to the page. Now lets look at reading this information into flash. First of all remember that flash reads in variables in the format &name=value so in the above examples the screen height is written &height=768 . Now when I was looking at a few other tutorials which talk about reading these into flash, they have extra functions to add the & later. I found this to be troublesome and didn't always work. So I make myself add it at the start, this way I know the variables will read into flash correctly.

For this example we are going to use the fact that you can pass variables to a flash swf by adding them to the end of the name, like yourswf.swf&height=768 which will pass that variable into flash. In the above example we are using JavaScripts, document.write function to output the cookie onto the html page. To get JavaScript to write the tags to put the SWF onto the page & write the cookie variables on the end to pass them into flash.

You'll notice in the above example a section in italics, replace that section with this code, making sure you change "YOURSWF.swf" to fit your site, also the colour, and size variables.

All you need to do now is have a flash movie that has the following variables

Click to enlarge

height
width
colorDepth
appVersion
appName
cpu
language
cookieEnabled

As they say in the cooking shows "Here's one I prepared earlier"

Download file zip file includes, FLA, HTML & SWF files

Remember for flash to understand your variables the names must be preceeded with an & other than that it's rather simple. You can store lots of information in cookies, you can ask you users for information, write it too a cookie then get flash to read it back to you. Go for it, try it and see what you can do.