Understanding How ColdFusion MX and Flash MX Communicate

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Before you begin to build your first Flash Remoting application, take a quick look at the steps that make integration possible.

First, any Flash movie that will communicate with a ColdFusion template must include the special class NetServices.as. After it's included in a movie's ActionScript, that movie can call upon a ColdFusion template as an ActionScript function.

The called ColdFusion template can perform any number of queries, computations, and so on, as long as it saves the desired result as an object named flash.result. The Flash movie can then use that special object variable as input. The flash.result data may contain a simple variable, such as a name, or it may contain a more complex group of data, such as a set of records returned by a ColdFusion query.

Conversely, for a Flash movie to pass data to a ColdFusion MX template, the movie's ActionScript must call the ColdFusion template as a function and pass any necessary data as function arguments. When a ColdFusion template is called this way, the data passed by Flash is available as a special variable called flash.params, which may be used as input for further operations in the ColdFusion template. You gain a greater understanding of this process as you build a sample Flash Remoting application in the next section.

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