The paperCrane’s view from the reverseFold

I’ve been trying to load a Flex application which is hosted on a website from within an AIR application which is also built with Flex. Things looked good when an HTML component displayed the website the application was on and allowed me to interact with the page through the DOM (automatically filling out form fields and submitting while listening for a load is a nice hack to avoid rewriting code for webservices :-). Once I got to the page with the flex application on it, however, I got nothing but the “install flash” message we show in the div that is usually replaced by SWFObject. No problem, SWFObject probably wasn’t up to it. Alas, a simple object/embed tag also failed to show the flex aplication. Somewhat disheartened, I also tried SWFLoader but got a security error when the swf tried to access its parent (ugh). A little searching showed some posts on Adobe’s forum and some bugs in their bug system that showed that neither of these things were supported. Flash files aren’t loaded in the HTML component in AIR because they haven’t figured out how to deal with it yet and Flex apps can’t be loaded into Flex apps due to the security sandbox and a Flex bug that triggers it. Oh well, I’ll have to settle for opening up a web page.