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Working with Rich Media Annotations
Updated 11/13/2009

Using the JavaScript/ActionScript Bridge

Skills Required: Flex, ActionScript, Acrobat 9

Calling ActionScript from Acrobat:

Acrobat's scripting language is JavaScript. In order to trigger events in an embedded RMA, you'll need to call the exposed ActionScript functions inside it. If you know how to communicate between an HTML page in a browser and the Flash browser plug-in, this will feel pretty familiar.

Three Steps to setting up the bridge from Acrobat JavaScript to ActionScript

1. In ActionScript, add the method you want to call
2. In ActionScript, set up a callback for that method
3. In Acrobat JavaScript, get a reference to the RMA

To call the Flex method from Acrobat, you need to get a reference to the SWF object. You then call the method on that object, passing whatever parameters you want... just like with HTML.

Unlike HTML, you have no way to assign a name or ID to the SWF when placing the SWF into the PDF file using Acrobat. Instead, the Acrobat JavaScript SDK can be used to get a reference to the RMA that represents the SWF object on the page.

getAnnotsRichMedia returns an array of AnnotRichMedia objects for a given page. So if you only had one RMA on the first page of a document, the JavaScript to reference it would look like this...

RMA = this.getAnnotsRichMedia(0)[0]

Once you have a reference to the SWF, callAS calls into ActionScript with the ExternalInterface calling convention to an exposed method. In the attached example code, the "requestPhotos" method makes a request from the Flickr API. Using the same RMA object from the code above, calling the method from Acrobat would look like this if you were looking for images of "spring flowers".

RMA.callAS("requestPhotos", "spring flowers")

In the example PDF file linked below, the "Search" button contains the following code that takes the value of the "term" field and sends it to the RMA as long as the RMA is active. If the RMA is not active, you are alerted to activate it first. Look for this code in the "MouseUp" action of the "search" button.

RMA = this.getAnnotsRichMedia(0)[0]
if (RMA.activated == true)
{ 
    RMA.callAS("requestPhotos", this.getField("term").value)
}
else
{
    app.alert("The RMA must be activated first.")
}          

Calling Acrobat from ActionScript:

To call Acrobat methods from the SWF, you'd use ExternalInterface.call just like you would with HTML. You can call any Acrobat method in the Acrobat JavaScript SDK. You can also call any methods that are in application level or document level JavaScripts. You can also use "eval" to send JavaScript into Acrobat from ActionScript and the return value of that method in Acrobat will be returned to your ActionScript method.

If you wanted your SWF to know how many pages were in the PDF file, you could use the following line of code.

var pages:int = ExternalInterface.call('eval', "this.numPages")

In the example PDF file linked below, the "credit" field gets populated by the RMA as you roll over the images. In the itemRenderer of the TileList mouseOver event, the following line gets executed. The first argument "eval" tells Acrobat to treat the second argument as JavaScript. The second argument concatenates a string to create the proper JavaScript to set the value of the "credit" field using the data object passed to the itemRenderer.

ExternalInterface.call("eval", "this.getField('credit').value = '"+data.credit+"'")

The Flickr RMA is a very basic example built on the Flickr RIA. It's simple but what it demonstrates is the foundation for doing far more interesting things with RMAs and Acrobat.

PDF Example using the Flickr RMA
Flickr RMA Project

Please take a look at the Yahoo Map example for a more exciting implementation.

Additional references:
Accessing Flex from JavaScript

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