IPHONE AFFILIATE PROGRAM?

Passing Variables in Flash for an Affiliate Program

• My website publishes on-line video content and is putting together an affiliate program. Our billing solution needs a variable to track who the affiliate is. We need to assign a tracking variable, give it to our partners, have it persist through our flash based website and terminate at the URL for our order path. Here are the specifics: Our billing partner uses "rsrc=affiliate" as the variable and expects an order path URL in the following format - "http://www.blank.com/blankpass/index.html?pcode={pcode}&rsrc=affiliate" My site is done entirely in Flash MX, published in Flash Player Version 4 and only uses the Actions-BrowserNetwork-GetURL command in our movies. I assume I give our partners our URL in the following form - http://www.mywebsite.com?rsrc=affiliate. How do I code my flash movies/HTML so that the "rsrc=affiliate" persists throughout potential customers tour through my website?

• Answer:

  Dear jr1734 Your question seems straight forward to me. Let me try to break it down - and supply snippets of code where that is pertinent. 1) << I give our partners our URL in the following form: http://www.mywebsite.com?rsrc=affiliate >> The customer finds your affiliate's site, sees a banner for your service, and clicks the above mentioned link. Then the customer arrive at your server. 2) Your setup: You did not mention anything about your server, or the kind of server side script options you have available, so I will assume that you want this done without resorting to anything more than the scripting available in Explorer / Netscape. The Buyer downloads a HTML document with this URL from your server. http://www.mywebsite.com?rsrc=affiliate First you need to extract the part after the question mark from the URL. This part is called the "query string", and if the query string consist of any non-ascii letters, they are URL-encoded. Extracting the query string can be very eaily done with Javascript. Here are some lines of code for extracting the query string and making sure that : Javascript Code: function getQueryString() { str = document.location.search; return str; } (Note: If you use the Apache web server, this can be very easily done with something called SSI - server side includes. And other servers have other options. But as I said, it can be done perfectly well with Javascript, so if you don't know about server side scripting, you do not have to worry.) 3) Now you have the query string. All that remains is to get that string into you flash movie. To do that you need to ADD the query string to the path pointing to your flash movie: Let us say that your movie is named "mymovie.swf". You need to embed "mymovie.swf?rsrc=affiliate" in the HTML code. Let us further say that the movie has background color #000000 (black), it is 600 pixels wide and 400 pixels tall. Then the final embedded code should look like this: <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=5,0,0,0" width="600" height="400"> <param name="movie" value="mymovie.swf?rsrc=affiliate"> <param name="quality" value="best"> <param name="menu" value="false"> <param name="align" value="lt"> <param name="scale" value="exactfit"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"> <embed src="mymovie.swf?rsrc=affiliate" quality="best" scale="exactfit" salign="lt" menu="false" bgcolor="#000000" width="600" height="400" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?p1_prod_version=shockwaveflash"> </embed></object> Are you with me so far? This is the way Macromedia recommends solving the problems of using flash in banner campaigns etc. Here is a link to the Macromedia Training Center for rich media banners: http://www.macromedia.com/resources/richmedia/tracking/ 4) You need to generate the code above on the fly, and that too can be done with Javascript: Javascript Code: function flash4EmbedCode (mov_src, mov_wdt, mov_hgt, mov_col) { embed_code = '<object \n'; embed_code += ' classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" \n'; embed_code += ' codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=5,0,0,0"\n'; embed_code += ' width="' + mov_wdt + '" height="' + mov_hgt + '">\n'; embed_code += ' <param name="movie" value="' + mov_src + '">\n'; embed_code += ' <param name="quality" value="best">\n'; embed_code += ' <param name="menu" value="false">\n'; embed_code += ' <param name="align" value="lt">\n'; embed_code += ' <param name="scale" value="exactfit" \n'; embed_code += ' <param name="bgcolor" value="' + mov_col + '">\n'; embed_code += '<embed \n'; embed_code += ' src="' + mov_src + '" \n'; embed_code += ' quality="best" scale="exactfit" salign="lt" menu="false" \n'; embed_code += ' bgcolor=' + mov_col + ' \n'; embed_code += ' width="' + mov_wdt + '" \n'; embed_code += ' height="' + mov_hgt + '" \n'; embed_code += ' type="application/x-shockwave-flash" \n'; embed_code += ' pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?p1_prod_version=shockwaveflash">\n'; embed_code += '</embed></object>'; return embed_code; } 5) Bringing the javascript together. All you need to do is to embed this chunk of code in an HTML document wher you want the movie to appear: <script type="text/javascript><!-- // this you have to set var src = "mymovie.swf"; var wdt = "600"; var hgt = "400"; var col = "#000000"; function getQueryString() { str = document.location.search; return str; } // gets the query information src = src + getQueryString(); function flash4EmbedCode (mov_src, mov_wdt, mov_hgt, mov_col) { embed_code = '<object \n'; embed_code += ' classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" \n'; embed_code += ' codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=5,0,0,0"\n'; embed_code += ' width="' + mov_wdt + '" height="' + mov_hgt + '">\n'; embed_code += ' <param name="movie" value="' + mov_src + '">\n'; embed_code += ' <param name="quality" value="best">\n'; embed_code += ' <param name="menu" value="false">\n'; embed_code += ' <param name="align" value="lt">\n'; embed_code += ' <param name="scale" value="exactfit" \n'; embed_code += ' <param name="bgcolor" value="' + mov_col + '">\n'; embed_code += '<embed \n'; embed_code += ' src="' + mov_src + '" \n'; embed_code += ' quality="best" scale="exactfit" salign="lt" menu="false" \n'; embed_code += ' bgcolor=' + mov_col + ' \n'; embed_code += ' width="' + mov_wdt + '" \n'; embed_code += ' height="' + mov_hgt + '" \n'; embed_code += ' type="application/x-shockwave-flash" \n'; embed_code += ' pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?p1_prod_version=shockwaveflash">\n'; embed_code += '</embed></object>'; return embed_code; } // generates the embed code var embed_code = flash4EmbedCode (src, wdt, hgt, col); // actally embeds the movie document.write (embed_code); //--></script> Phew! Are you with me so far ? 6) At this moment the information we need actually resides on the main timeline (what you would call '_level0' in action script terminology). I assume that you have some kind of actionscripting to keep track of what the customers order (that would be the pcode part below). Actually opening the URL that confirms the order is the easy part. All you need is to append the 'affiliate code' (that resides in level 0) to the other information generated by the flash movie. The actionscript command would look like this: Flash actinscript (on a button) on (release) { getURL ("http://www.blank.com/blankpass/index.html?" add "pcode=pcode&" add "rsrc=" add _level0:rsrc); } 7) You are done! This solution works in Flash 4 movies, in Netscape and Explorer and Mozilla and Opera, on a Mac and on a PC. Good luck!