Macromedia Flash® ActionScript: Training from the Source

Lesson 13. External Data Connections One of Macromedia Flash's most useful features is its capability to communicate with external sources, sending data to and receiving data from other locations. This makes Flash a powerful application developmen...

What You Will Learn In this lesson, you will: Discover the data formats that Flash can loadLearn about the objects designed for data transferSend and receive data from a serverLearn about policy files and how to use themSave data to your hard dri...

Approximate Time This lesson takes approximately one and one half hours to complete. ...

Lesson Files Media Files: Lesson13/Assets/Poll.asp Lesson13/Assets/Poll.mdb Starting Files: Lesson13/Start/poll1.fla Lesson13/Start/journal1.fla Lesson13/Start/Translator1.fla Completed Projects: Lesson13/Completed/poll2.fla Lesson13/Comp...

Understanding Data Sources and Data Formats A data source is a place from which Flash can load external data (that is, data not directly programmed into the movie). For example, Flash can load data from a simple text file, and that text file is co...

GET versus POST There are two ways to transfer data between the server and Flash when working with server-side scripts: via GET or via POST. These two techniques for sending variables and their associated values are used in regular HTML pages and ...

Using the LoadVars Class You use the LoadVars class when working with data in the URL string format. This class enables you to load variable data from a text file, or to send and load variable data to and from a server-side script. Note Althou...

Policy Files In this section, you will learn about the Flash Player security restrictions as they apply to loading external data, and how the restrictions can be bypassed. By default, a SWF file can load external data only from the domain on whic...

Using Shared Objects A SWF file can save data (variables as well as array, XML, and other data objects) to a user's hard drive using shared objectssimilar to but more powerful than the cookies used by web browsers. You can use shared objects to st...

Using the WebServiceConnector Component Through the use of the WebServiceConnector component, a Flash movie can connect to a Web service and load information from it. A Web service is a server-side application that accepts data, performs a service...

What You Have Learned In this lesson, you have: Learned about the data formats that Flash can accept (pages 319321)Discovered how GET and POST are used to transfer data (pages 321322)Gained experience using the LoadVars object to communicate with...