Popup window from Flash, exact-sized, without browser buttons or scrollbar

Just got an email about opening a scrollbar-less, browser button bar-less, exact-sized window from Flash.  Or what’s commonly called among desperate googlers, a Flash popup window. But keep in mind, your content in the window that pops up doesn’t have to be Flash.

This was pretty easy and reliable back in the Actionscript 2 days. This tutorial’s sales page has some good examples of a Flash popup in action… http://www.cartoonsmart.com/animation_fx.html … even with Safari or Firefox being set to block popup windows, those links for each animation still open fine. 

I guess I hadn’t tried making a similar Flash popup window in Actionscript 3, because I had a hell of a time getting it to work for this article. Mostly because I forgot I had Safari set to block popup windows, and after giving up on using the method I’ll show you below, I started on a semi-fruitless search for a way to resize and remove the browser bar with Javascript. Resizing was easy, but all the ancient Jedi ways of getting rid of the menubar don’t seem to work now. But in the zip file for this article I’ll also include an html file that resizes to an exact width and height once loaded. Or just google resizeTo and javascript for alternate examples. 

Anyway, get on with it, right…

Using Actionscript 2 all you need to use is this on your button….

on(release){
getURL (“javascript:popUp(‘http://www.cartoonsmart.com/fx_examples/the_gloom.html’)”);
}

…..WITH  the javascript below somewhere between your Head tags in the html thats embedding your swf….

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript”>
function popUp(theURL) {
var top=open(theURL,”winname”,”width=600,height=500,toolbar=0,location=0,directories=0,status=0,menubar=0,scrollbars=0,resizable=0″);
top.focus();
}
</SCRIPT>

Notice the function name popUp which appears in both sets of code. That should clue ya in as to how this works. And if you do want it to work, be sure you upload everything and test it live. Locally won’t do thing. You can see a working example here. Which is the same file included in the source files linked up below. 

Now using Actionscript 3, here’s some less-than-perfect code for a movieclip with an instance name of your_button…

var js:URLRequest=new URLRequest();
js.url=”javascript:window.open(‘http://www.cartoonsmart.com&#8217;,’popUp’,’width=800,height=400′);newWindow.focus(); void(0);”;

your_button.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK,openPopUp);

function openPopUp(evt:MouseEvent):void {
navigateToURL(js,”_self” );
trace( “Warning! this might not work in browsers that are set to block pop up windows”);
}

 

This example doesn’t need any javascript written in an html file. Come to think of it, I probably could have found a similar method in AS2 that didn’t require adding code to your html, but whatever, it works.  You can see an example of the AS3 Flash popup here… But remember, it probably won’t work if your browser prefs block popups. 

I’m shelving this in the Coding Category of the blog, in case you need to find it quickly later.  Source files are linked up right below.