A while ago I subscribed to an online magazine. Its a bit laddish, but it has the odd interesting article, and its done in flash/flex.

The most recent article arrived in my in-box the other day, and one of the pages was an advert for the new film 'eagle eye' rather unfortunately they had passed in your subscription name value as a flashVar in the URL scope.

This is probably one of the easiest ways to pass variables into flex, but also the most unsecure, and easily changed, as per the screen shot below. Luckily in this case it was just a display variable, but what about if this was a query param? or a value for a piece of data being sent back to a server?

There are many other ways of passing variables into flex apps, I'd go for using a properties file. Have your flex look for a server side XML definitions file on "creationComplete". Or edit your Embed/Object code, whilst still not ideal its far better than a url variable!

The magazine:
http://www.monkeymag.co.uk/