Forum Moderators: not2easy
What I was thinking of making was a Flash animation that showed the layout of my school building and when the user moused over a room a box would pop up with information about the room (ie. the teachers in it, subjects taught, phone extention, etc.). I think I figured out how to do this, but my idea came with static information to be displayed in the box that popped up. What I was wondering was is there some way to have the information drawn from a database where the information could be referenced say in boxes (like A10, B10 and C10) then if the info changed I could just change the spreadsheet rather than go into the actual flash and change the info there?
I hope you get what I am talking about. I have a feeling this is pretty heavy duty stuff I am thinking about but I thought I would ask anyway.
Thanks-
Have a look around at flashkit.com they have a sample swf for importing text.
Maybe a database would be better, but me and db's don't seem to get along to well. ;)
You can also get an Adobe product called Graphics Server (formerly AlterCast) that will take text input from a file and then alter a graphic based on that input. You would create your pop-up box as an image and then the Graphics Server would remake that image when you changed the file holding the text to be displayed in the pop-up box.
The Graphics Server works very well, for example, on product icons for websites. Say my widget picture icon has text that lists its current price. If I want to change the prices for widgets then I just change the price in the database/text file and feed that into the Graphics Server which basically runs a script which pulls in the new price onto the appropriate layer and re-saves the graphic file.
Does that mean he would have to upload the SWF along witht he text file?
anyway, php with the ming-module (swf creation on the fly) might be an appropriate, os independent solution for you.
"Flash allows website integration to pull info from regular web ways and you can also read in content from a text file without a server side language."
I am interested in what Korkus said. I would like to make this as simple as possible and not having to use applications running on the werver would be the best bet.
That said, I got word that our server "is a Unix box (FreeBSD) with Apache". Does that mean anything to anyone else? And this is after I have taken a networking class. Sad isn't it? I understand what Unix is but I am not sure how to make it so that this situation would work.
Like I said before, computers were supposed to make life easier.
tutorials on PHP and flash
[actionscript-toolbox.com...]
[phpbuilder.com...]
If you want quick and easy use a text file for dynamic info in a Flash movie. Since you are using apache you should have access to PHP. You can integrate databases and all PHP stuff into the flash movie on the fly.
I would just have trouble creating the text form.
Would Flash be able to call a text file made by a cgi script? (ex: NewsPro spits out a TXT file to be included by SSI).
Could I also call a variable located in a regular .pl or .cgi file?
