Recipe 3.11. Prompting the User to Change Player Settings

Problem

You want to open the user's Flash Player Settings dialog box to prompt her to allow greater access to her local system.

Solution

Use the flash.system.Security.showSettings( ) method.

Discussion

The flash.system.Security.showSettings( ) method opens the Flash Player Settings dialog box, which includes several tabs. You'll pass a string as a parameter to indicate which tab you want it to open. These strings have been made static properties of the flash.system.SecurityPanel class, to avoid typographical errors. The possible values are:

SecurityPanel.CAMERA

Allows the user to select a camera to use.

SecurityPanel.DEFAULT

Shows whichever tab was opened the last time the Security Panel was open.

SecurityPanel.LOCAL_STORAGE

Allows the user to specify how local shared objects are stored, including the maximum allowable disk usage.

SecurityPanel.MICROPHONE

Allows the user to select a microphone and adjust the volume.

SecurityPanel.PRIVACY

Allows the user to specify whether to allow Flash access to her camera and microphone.

SecurityPanel.SETTINGS_MANAGER

Opens a new browser window and loads the Settings Manager page, which gives the user several more detailed options and the ability to make global changes, rather than just to the domain of the specific movie that is active.

If you don't pass any parameters to the showSettings( ) method, it uses SecurityPanel.DEFAULT. Here, we open the Settings dialog box to the Local Storage tab by explicitly specifying a value of 1.

// Open the Settings dialog box to the Local Storage tab.
flash.system.Security.showSettings(SecurityPanel.LOCAL_STORAGE);

Out of courtesy, you should prompt the user to open the Settings dialog with a button rather than simply opening it without warning. Also, you should alert the user beforehand as to which settings she should change.