I'm writing what is essentially a browser in Adobe AIR (ActionScript, not AJAX). A great bit of functionality to implement would be protocol handling. iTunes, for instance, handles itms protocols; when your friend sends you a link beginning with "itms://", it's going to launch iTunes as long as it's installed. Is there a way to write an AIR app (requiring AIR 2 would be fine) that can be the "handler" for a protocol in this way?
+1
A:
Yes. You can use the URLLoader class to download data in binary form (URLLoader.BINARY) and then parse this as appropriate. See this CS3 documentation on working with external data.
dirkgently
2010-03-16 21:51:44
You misunderstand me; what I'm looking for is a way to launch/invoke my AIR app when the user navigates to a URL within the browser, before the page even loads.If you type an itms:// URL into your browser's address bar, it will open/invoke iTunes, because iTunes is the handler of the itms protocol. That's what I would like; for my AIR app to be the handler of a protocol.
Rezmason
2010-03-18 13:13:23
Then what you are really looking for is adding support for a custom protocol in your browser. See: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/IP/FirefoxProtocol.aspx for details.
dirkgently
2010-03-18 14:25:19
A:
http://www.patrick-heinzelmann.de/labs/lastfm/
I'm not sure exactly how it works and I don't see a way to download the app, so I can't even test it, but maybe it will help...
Jay Paroline
2010-05-21 21:20:49
That's really interesting... and descriptive. I can probably use that information to locate the files which would need to be edited to allow this sort of thing. Then, I can write my AIR app to find and edit those files. Since it's a trusted application, that shouldn't be a problem.
Rezmason
2010-05-22 01:25:18
A:
Check out this page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa767914%28VS.85%29.aspx I am trying to find out the same thing, but I haven't found any solution to do it with just Air yet. Seems like you might need a custom installer to setup the correct registry entries, and a proxy application to "wash" the input to a correct format that then can start your application with the correct command line parameters. Hope this can be of any assistance.
Kimonoki
2010-08-31 13:37:06