Validating and Submitting Flash Forms

Today we write our own ActionScript function to validate our Flash form. We see how the Flash form components have methods that we can use to access the values of the form components, be they combo boxes, list boxes, check boxes or simple text inputs.

In order to make our validation meaningful and complete, we clean up the form input by stripping leading and trailing white space from the input, as well as performing some basic testing to see if an email address is in the correct format. Because these functions are not native to ActionScript, we import them from external sources.

For people that filled the form in incorrectly, we build a dialog that displays the problems with the person's data entry. Once the data is validated, we build some root variables that contained the valid data and then send the information to a PHP script.

This is suitable for intermediate Flash developers, as it builds upon two previous beginner's tutorials, but reading those is not necessary, and the .FLA files are provided for download.

Dynamic Form Data

Last week we learned how we could build a form in Flash using the built-in components that Flash provides. The main problem we had with the form was that the form components that provided selections had their values hard coded within the Flash MX editor.

In most situations this isn't a big problem, but in the case of our Country combo box, 200+ countries is too many to type in. Or what about a drop-down menu of products, when the product list changes daily? Today we'll look at how we can make the form more dynamic. To do this we'll look at some of the ActionScript methods that we have for altering the form components, and how we can grab the data for them from a PHP script.

This is article 2 in a series of 3:

1: Flash Forms

Creating basic form elements in Flash

2: Dynamic Form Data

Populating form elements in Flash from a dynamic source.

The database is MySQL and the populating scripts are built in PHP.

3: Form Submission

Covers Flash form validation using ActionScript and submitting the data to a server.

The form submission script is written in PHP and submits the data to a MySQL server

For those of you who didn't read last week's article, the Flash MX movie form_base.fla is available for download that contains the results of following the previous tutorial.

Flash Forms

Today's article is the first in a series that covers building and using Flash forms. Flash forms are generally much more attractively designed than html forms because of the control you have over fonts etc in Flash. We will be covering from how to build the form to populating it with dynamic data, posting our results to a database and handling the response from our submission. Today we begin by looking at the elements that Flash provides for building forms and how they are used.

The sample FLA file is included for download so you can experiment with it or adapt it to your own needs.