If you’ve written at least once the OBJECT and EMBED tags, without copy/paste you may have been noticed that the place of the EMBED tag is a bit strange. Actually after the OBJECT tag, comes the PARAM sequence, that simply defines different parameters for the flash movie.

And what looks strange?

The strange thing in all this is that the EMBED tag, which in fact is only one, instead of the case with all the parameters of the OBJECT, is displayed just before the closing of the OJBECT tag.

Experimenting …

What if the embed tag is outside of the OBJECT opening and closing tags. Actually only IE understands this as a problem. Than it displays the move twice!

That’s why the place of the EMBED is just before closing the OBJECT tag. In that case MSIE doesn’t “see” the EMBED and displays everything correctly!

The most simple way to describe the case is as if you have the ExternalInterface addCallback in the Flex application like that:

flex.mxml

ExternalInterface.addCallback("jsFunc", flexFunc);

public flexFunc() : void
{ ... }

and in the javascript code you’ve something like that:

file.js

function getSwf(movieName) {
    if (navigator.appName.indexOf("Microsoft") != -1) {
         return window[movieName];
    } else{
         return document[movieName];
    }
}

getSwf('movie').jsFunc();

that will execute the flexFunc in the flex app.

Important!

is very important to have the object/embed tag correct:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6 ....
<param name="name" value="movie" />
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
<param name="AllowScriptAccess" value="always" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<param name="flashVars" />
<param name="src" value="movie.swf" />
<embed ... name="movie"></embed>
</object>

That doesn’t work? Where’s the bug?

Even it’s not so clear the bug is present. The getSwf function gets the window[moviename], or document[moviename] depending of which browser is used. But the problem is that both object and embed tags have same name and the selected object is not one but two.

So there’s a simple patch

Name the object embed tags with different names, i.e.

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11 ...>
<param name="name" value="movieie" />
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
<param name="AllowScriptAccess" value="always" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<param name="flashVars" />
<param name="src" value="movie.swf" />
<embed ... name="movieie"></embed>
</object>

now they are named movieie (for IE) and movieff (for Firefox) and we must to change a bit the getSwf function like that:

function getSwf(movieName) {
    if (navigator.appName.indexOf("Microsoft") != -1) {
         return window[movieName + 'ie'];
    } else{
         return document[movieName + 'ff'];
    }
}

getSwf('movie').jsFunc();

<param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”>

parameter of the object tag. You may also set allowFullScreen=”true” of embed tag.