Mailto link from external text file in AS3

I was emailed the following question below about how to load an email address from an external text file from the mailto in Actionscript 3 tutorial.

I have been searching around trying to find a tutorial that will show how to make a mailto link work in an external text file that is being loaded into flash. Do you have any suggestions?

For my solution I have used the following two tutorials: Load external text in Actionscript 3 and mailto in Actionscript 3. I have basically defined a variable to hold the externally load text which then gets passed into URLRequest() method in the mailto function.


Mailto link from external text file in AS3

Step 1

Open up a Flash AS3 file save it.
Then create or import an image you wish to use as the mailto button. I have used an image of an envelope, but you can use whatever image you wish. Convert your button in a symbol (F8) and give it the instance name: ‘mailto_btn’.




Step 2

Open up a text editing program of your choice and write the email address that you want to be loaded externally. For example: somebody1234567@example.com. Save the text file with the name “external_address” in the same directory of your fla file.


Step 3

On the timeline insert a new layer called ‘Actions’ then open up the Actions panel and enter the following code:

//Variable to hold the external email address.
var external_address:String;

//Creates a new instances of the loader class.
var my_loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();

//Create a new instance of the URLRequest object with the path
//to the external text file.
var my_req:URLRequest=new URLRequest("external_address.txt");

//Event listener to listen to when the file has finished loading.
my_loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, loadExternalText);

//This loads the text file into the URLloader.
my_loader.load(my_req);

//This assigns the load text file to the external_address variable.
function loadExternalText(event:Event):void {
   external_address=my_loader.data;
}

//This adds a mouse click event to the mailto button.
mailto_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, mailto);

//The mailto function open up email application to send email.
function mailto(event:MouseEvent):void {
   var email:URLRequest=new URLRequest("mailto:"+external_address);
   navigateToURL(email, "_blank");
}

Step 4

Finally test your movie clip Ctrl + Enter and you should now be able to load an email address from external text files.