I Need to allow programs to run!

[Trentham]

I'm developing a small app which is to be used to choose which facility to run. The user (effectively) clicks a button on the app and is taken to what has been chosen. This could be a web page on the intranet, a flash movie or an executable program.

It's in running the executable program that I'm having problems since it detects that I am downloading an executable file and asks if I want to save or open it. Clearly I always want to open it.

What do I need to do in order for this to happen without asking?

The app is a raw flash movie but could equally be embedded in an HTML document. The web server runs on the same machine and is Apache Win32 and heavy use is made elsewhere of PHP4. The browser is Internet Explorer 6.

 

[wangbar]

Flash isn't the source of your problems here - it's a browser security issue. It's the browser that pops up that dialog box, not the app running in the page - nothing you do in Flash directly will get around this.

Besides, nobody that I can think of would like a Flash website to be able to install software directly on their system without their permission: that's effectively a virus.

 

[Trentham]

I was hoping that because I'm running this thing locally (rather than on a proper website) I might be able to get round the security problems.

Perhpas I need to investigate this in another forum.

 

[wangbar]

Maybe you could run it as a self contained Flash projector? That way you can open .exes using fscommand, no browser involved, but you can still link to the server for dynamic content.

 

[Trentham]

Well this certainly seems to get close to what I need!

As far as I can determine (by experiment) fscommand seems to have a number of limitations...
1. It can't handle execution paths containing spaces
2. It can't handle UNC path names so can't manage network drives other than by mapping (eg. \\machine\folder\proggy.exe won't work)
3. I can't set the required environment, particularly working folder.

Having said that, it seems that using a batch file will solve these problems, albeit in a rather messy way. I'm sure there's a better solution lying around somewhere but I'm sure this is on the right track.

 

[wangbar]

There are some third party applications which extend Flash's inbuilt features like this one:

http://www.lpflashex.com/

...which solve a lot of those problems without having to write batch files or there's always Director.

 

[Trentham]

Well I had a look at lpflashex but I havn't a clue what it's supposed to be all about! I run LPManager as per the instrauctions but all I *seem* to get is a Flash Player (empty) screen! The information on the web site is less than helpful.