Building Data-Driven Flash Movies

Interesting read. The dynamic feeding of external data sources into Flash is great, more of the same please!

Art & Logic has just released a "web server toolkit":http://www.artlogic.com/dmf/ based on the open source GoAhead WebServer. The cool part is that it can communicate with Flash presentations using XML-RPC. The idea is to create GUI's to control embedded devices using Flash in addition to (or instead of) HTML. They've posted a little "demo":http://dev.artlogic.com:8080/index.html running on Windows, but in the real world the server would run on a low-power device.

For the life of me I can't get this to work in Flash MX. When I run the flash movie, nothing shows up in my dynamic text box.

Here is the AS code:
loadVariables("message.txt", "_root");

I have also tried:
loadVariablesNum("message.txt", 0);

message.txt is a text file in the same directory as the flash file with the contents:
msg=hello

The name of my text field is msg.

Surely this is something very simple.

TIA, crystal

sorry if this isn't the appropriate place to put this but there is a problem with page 6 - the PHP script that shows the query to the database for the news flash isn't being displayed.
The article is a pretty good read other than that...

I'm having the same problem. Have you solved this, Crystal?

Thanks.

Matt

In flash MX, make sure your text field has an instance name and a variable name, then in your message.txt file use the same variable name.

// message.txt
myVar = bla bla

// code main timeline of flash movie
loadVariables("message.txt", "txtFieldInstance_txt");

Or, leave the variable field blank and use the variable name "text" in your txt file

// message.txt
text = bla bla

// code main timeline of flash movie
loadVariables("message.txt", "txtFieldInstance_txt");

hth

Jon
jon@AsNative.com

In flash MX, make sure your text field has an instance name and a variable name, then in your message.txt file use the same variable name.

// message.txt
myVar = bla bla

// code main timeline of flash movie
loadVariables("message.txt", "txtFieldInstance_txt");

Or, leave the variable field blank and use the variable name "text" in your txt file

// message.txt
text = bla bla

// code main timeline of flash movie
loadVariables("message.txt", "txtFieldInstance_txt");

hth

Jon
jon@AsNative.com

I have everything working using Flash 5.0 except my Dynamic Text is not being displayed. All I see are the buttons, but no text.

Please help!

other than that liked the article

I have been trying forever to get this to work! Some of the code is missing in this post so I went to melonfire and copied everything verbatim. Has anyone else had these problems.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

mb

you need to name the instance of the movie clip called text e.g. instanceText
then change the line to
set ("itemInstance"+i+".instanceText.label", items[i]);

Building Data-Driven Flash Movies

July 23, 2002 - Contrary to what you might think, Flash isn't just all tweens and motion blurs. The application comes with powerful data-retrieval capabilities, which allow you to hook your Flash movie clips up to a database (or any other external data source) and dynamically build movie clips that are easy to update and modify. Find out more, in this rough guide to the data-driven Flash universe.

Please discuss this article in this thread. You can read the article here .

hey guys..
i m havin similar problems...nothing is bein displayed when I reached the "ticker.php" section....
has anyone figured out whats goin wrong?

guys - not sure what the problems are with the text on devshed, but we have an archived copy of the article on http://www.melonfire.com/community/...icle.php?id=141

I am using Flash MX and having no luck with this. I know it is loading the file because if I yank the external file (message.txt) out of the directory - I get a load error. I set it up just as the article said:



I named the instance of the Dynamic Text box graphic symbol 'instanceText' after reading this thread, and my keyframe action on Frame 1 of my Main timeline is:



when the instance of the graphic symbol is left blank, or


When I name the instance of the graphic symbol.

I have tried many different variations - but all I get is a blank text box. What am I missing? I have tried everything I have read in this thread....so I am not sure what detail it is that I am missing. Thanks in advance for any help.