CODEWITHSUNDEEP
jqueryflashtrackinginteraction
Mohamad
Mohamad

Reputation: 35349

Is it possible to track user interaction with flash outside of the SWF and from the browser?

I have been tasked with tracking user interactions with a flash movie that contains several chapters. I need to track which chapters the user decides to watch. But I have no access to the flash movie itself and I can not modify it.

The movie loads in a modal. I do have access to the HTML page from which the modal is spawned.

This is a screenshot of the interface. There are 6 chapters. Users can select the chapters they want to watch. They can then click Play Your Demo. Alternatively there's a Play All button. I would like to track which chapters users select.

This can be easily done with flash, but this is not an option. I hope I can use jQuery on the page to monitor user clicks. I am inclined to say this is not possible though, since JS can not track events/interactions with the flash movie, but I could be wrong.

Any ideas are appreciated.

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Upvotes: 0

Views: 386

Answers (2)

weltraumpirat
weltraumpirat

Reputation: 22604

Just a thought: If you can modify the HTML page the content SWF is loaded into, you might be able to track Flash events by creating an ActionScript wrapper program, which then loads the original SWF into its own application domain. Most of the mouse events and ADDED and REMOVED events bubble up in the display list, unless the programmer explicitly prevented it. So if you add event listeners to the loaded content, you may well be able to gain some introspection into what's going on inside of it.

Of course, it is impossible to say how much information you can gather from this, but it seems like it's worth a try.

Upvotes: 1

jessegavin
jessegavin

Reputation: 75650

You would need to be able to use Javascript to detect when these events are happening inside the flash movie. Unless your flash movie is already programmed to send messages to javascript (via the ExternalInterface class as @Diodeus mentioned), you can't do this on the client side.

If the flash movie itself is broken up into several individual "child" swfs which are loaded dynamically from the parent SWF, then you might be able to gather some analytics from your server logs. For example, if the "Chapter 1" button loads a child SWF named "chatper_1.swf", your server should be logging that request.

Upvotes: 2

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