Linking movies to external items
Provided by Adam Montandon

I have information that needs to be updated weekly, can I link open another movie or html or Pdf from my original Director Movie.
Mark Neretlis

This is quite a common question, so I decided to put together all the code I could think of that deals with the subject. Now, the code is half Lingo, half HTML, so if you understand how links work in HTML its pretty similar in Director, with just one or two extra things.

Now, You'll notice for all my examples I use the On MouseUp handler, that is perfect for buttons, well, you can use any handler you like.

Linking to a html page.
You can use this code to link to other html pages on the web.

This code links to a page called news.htm that must be on the same server and in the same directory as your .dcr movie file:
on mouseUp
  gotoNetPage "news.html"
end

This code links to a file called news.html in a folder called something on a server called myserver.com
on mouseUp
  gotoNetPage "http://www.myserver.com/something/news.html"
end

This code links to a file called news.html in a folder called afolder on a server called somebodyelsesserver.com. You could use this to link to somebody else's web page.
on mouseUp
  gotoNetPage "http://www.somebodyelsesserver.com/afolder/news.html"
end

This code shows you how you can use html style targets, where the page called news.htm will open in a blank window. You can change your target name to use it with frames, etc. The additional target code can go after any URL.
on mouseUp
  gotoNetPage "news.html", "_blank"
end






Linking to a .pdf
.pdf files are great for things like printable sales information. You can link to a .pdf in exactly the same way as a html file, as long as the viewer has the acrobat reader installed on their machine.

On mouseUp
  gotoNetPage "sales.pdf"
end

on mouseUp
  gotoNetPage "http://www.myserver.com/something/sales.pdf"
end

on mouseUp
  gotoNetPage "http://www.somebodyelsesserver.com/afolder/sales.pdf"
end

You can even use targets in the same way
on mouseUp
  gotoNetPage "sales.pdf", "_blank"
end





Linking to another movie .dcr file
This is a little different as you are using the gotoNetMovie command this time. This opens up the movie in the same space as your existing movie. So the new, linked movie will "take over" the previous one. Even Global variables can be shared across movies used in this way. It's pretty handy! The only problem is the linked movie has to completely download before your existing movie is replaced, so on slower connections it may take a while.
On mouseUp
  gotoNetMovie "http://www.myserver.com/something/mymovie.dcr"
end

If the movie you are linking to has a marker, you can skip right to that marker like this:
on mouseUp
  gotoNetMovie "http://www.myserver.com/something/mymovie.dcr#Menu"
end
Just change the work Menu for the name of your marker.