including SWFs as part of rails content

rubyonrails-talk
1

I'm having difficulties developing pages that include simple SWFs as part of the content. Specifically, they won't play in MSIE 6. In Firefox and Opera the pages play exactly as planned, both Mac and Windows. SWFs are located in a subdirectory of /public. Has anyone run into a similar problem? Is there a tutorial that covers this anywhere? Thank you

2

Aren't plugins handled differently in MSIE 6+? You can't use Netscape style embed tags. Look into that and I'm guessing you'll find your problem.

3

This should, hopefully, show you what you need to do to properly embed your swf file.

4

Make sure you don’t have any spaces in your file path to the SWF. When I had this problem with IE is was because of that. Also IE doesn’t use src in the embed tag if I remember properly. It used the value of the param with the attribute ‘movie’ so make sure that path is correct.

Hope that helps.

5

This is directed to everybody - the problem seems to be related to serving swf's from inside VIEWS. It seems that you should be able to put a swf file in a subdirectory of RAILS_APP/public and link to that swf from an embed link in a view. Is there some special problem / way of serving flash from IE within rails?

6

I recently had this exact same issue as well. The solution to my problem was exactly what Michael said, I needed:

<param name="movie" value="/path/to/my_player.swf">

It's really not an issue with rails because it's your server that dishes up that content. You may wanna double check the mime type your server is spitting out too but I doubt that's part of the problem unless your server is very old (apache 1.3 or something). Not sure how the various browsers handle the type attribute but I wouldn't count on it.

good luck! Tim

7

Hi Folks,

Can I make a suggestion here? I began writing a lengthy reply to this subject, but figured it would be more useful to write a blog post on embedding SWF content in Ruby on Rails using SWFObject. So here it is:

HTH, let me know if you have any problems or if you have any comments/criticisms on the article itself and I will update it appropriately.

Cliff

tmac wrote:

8

Cliff great post, thanks for the help on this. I followed the SWFObject documentation and it works fine in IE Rocky

9

Cliff, I think you need to escape a few more < and > in the text. In the bullet that begins "There is no need to deal with ..." you have <embed> and <object> which cause problems (at least for Safari). -Rob