Search facility in flash combined with XHTML pages

hello all,

I new to server side scripting and require some advice if you would be happy enough to give it to me!

I am pretty compotent using flash 8 and SOME actionscript but there is a project i am currently working on that got my brain thinking. I would like to have a swf header in my page (simple enough?) but within this header i would like to have a search box and button so that users can search the site. The site is all in XHTML transitional.

I have seen the feature before on other sites but am very unsure how to go about doing it.

I would really appreciate some advice on this matter as i am new to server side scripting etc. It would be good if you could recommend the best/worst and indeed easiest methods in which to do this. Any tutorial URL's would also help.

Please help a newbie in dying need!

Cheers in advance
Evan

usually when you see a search on a site its because the entire site content is database driven. Is yours?

Otherwise I think google offers some sort of site search api but i'm not sure.

do you know if the google API is easy to integrate with flash?

I guess I can't answer that completely. However, my assumption is that it will not work well with Flash content at all. My understanding is that google just points its spider at your pages and that it will therefore only work with HTML content. Someone else may know better but thats all I've got.

This is not to say that you couldn't pass the search term to google from Flash its just that any content inside of flash wouldn't get indexed.

true, content from flash is not indexed, but he only wants the header in flash.
Ask in the php section, maybe someone can help you.

egr103

I think people may have misread your question. Your site is completely XHTML except for the header which is Flash. You want a form inside your Flash header to submit to an HTML page of the Google search service.

No problem, Flash forms can submit date to HTML pages. I did something similar on our website, with both the search and the client login.

Our site doesn't use Google's service, but I have used Google search service before. It's very easy.
http://www.google.com/coop/cse/
They give you what your form's fields should be called and where to submit the page.

For help building the form in Flash, you can find lots of tutorials online.

cheers guys for all the help.

I will post results of this up for your opinions!

I think linking with google via flash will be most beneficial!

thanks again