Quicktip: Avoiding popup blockers in AS3

Adobe/Macromedia did change a couple of things as the release of ActionScript 3 became a reality.

For once, it's not as easy as it once was to open an external browser window. There are many solutions to this floating around, many of them involve using the "wmode" parameter in the HTML embed code for the swf. In my opinion this is not a good idea cos it will bring a bunch of new problems with it, like handling textfields and so on. I've written a possible solution for this problem which works using standard embed code in the HTML. It simply tries to use the ExternalInterface, if that fails, it falls back to navigateToURL. Hey, remember to import ExternalInterface, URLRequest and NavigateToURL in order for it to compile properly.

private function openURL(url:String, window:String = "_blank") : void {
var WINDOW_OPEN_FUNCTION:String = "window.open";
if(!ExternalInterface.call(WINDOW_OPEN_FUNCTION, url, window)){
navigateToURL(new URLRequest(url),window);
}
}