How can i access cookie by flex?

Question

I made a blog widget in flex. I need manipulate cookie in my widget which is added to my user's blog. But under some circumstance, some blog hosts forbid accessing to javascript, so i can not access cookie in flex by externalInterface. Does anyone know how to access cookie in this context? thanks.

Answer 1

My answer is, you can't access browser cookies from the Flash Player. The ExternalInterface usage is kind of a hack.

Based on the error, it sounds like your SWF is being served from a different domain than the web page that contains it. Is that true? If so, that is the cause of the error. Isn't that the same sort of approach that "Cross Site Scripting" exploits use?

You can allow JavaScript to access it's HTML wrapper from a different domain by specifying the allowScriptAccess to always in the SWF embed code. More info in the Adobe docs.

You can try adding a crossdomain.xml file to the main site, although I did not think that would have an effect because I'm pretty sure that ExternalInterface usage is not a crossdomain.xml checking case.

Answer 2

You need to set allowScriptAccess to "*" in your embed code. Unfortunately, you cannot allow access on a per domain basis, so it's all or nothing. However, the owner of the blog might not want to grant this privilege, in which case you just cannot count on having access to Javascript from your swf.

PS: If you are allowed to serve a swf from the same domain with granted access to Javascript, you might be able to use it as proxy for sending the data retrieved with javascript to the swf served from the other domain. Not sure if this is the best idea, though.

Answer 3

I'm curious as to where the cookie is coming from. If your Flex application is creating the cookie via a SharedObject then you don't need javascript to access it. If the cookie is coming from another application/source then to my knowledge, the only real way to access it is via the javascript externalinterface method.