Loading local XML file

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NoNickNeeded - 03 Jan 2007 18:21 GMT

I need some help with a problem I'm having.

In my Flash application, the SWF file is located on a server and is downloaded
to clients in a controlled network. I want to be able to load XML data located
on the client machines into the SWF file. It looks like security settings is
not allowing this to happen, as the local files are treated as a separate
sandbox.

If I were to use System.security.allowDomain, how do I specify local files?
It's not a domain or URL.

Or is there another way to do this? I'm wading through the security
information, but I haven't found the solution yet.

FYI - this is for Flash Player 7.

Thanks!

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MotionMaker - 18 Jan 2007 20:41 GMT

Flash can read the local drive if the swf is launched from the user's OS.
However they will not have the Flash player necessarily installed ouside of the
web browser (although you can look into this as an additional step) so you
would want to publish an EXE instead which would have the player.

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NoNickNeeded - 18 Jan 2007 21:12 GMT

Thank you for the response. Unfortunately, the scale of the deployment and the
application requirements force the swf to be loaded from a server (updating
tens of thousands of clients with new swf files would be rough!). Also, the
client architecture requires the Flash application to run within a browser.

But I appreciate the help!

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MotionMaker - 19 Jan 2007 12:34 GMT

If you want you can have the user upload the file to web server. See
FileReference class: http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/8/main/00002204.html.
Then the onComplete method could use the XML class to download the data for
processing.

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NoNickNeeded - 22 Jan 2007 18:38 GMT

Thanks again, Lon. Unfortunately, FileReference is only available in Player 8.
This application needs to run on 7.

Also, the reason why the XML needs to be local is to prevent that
server-to-client transfer of data! This is the way it is currently designed,
but periodically sending 300 Mb of data to up to 10K clients isn't all that
bandwidth friendly.... We had the idea of trickling the XML file down to the
clients and loading it into Flash from there. But so far, I haven't found a
solution.

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MotionMaker - 22 Jan 2007 18:52 GMT

You may need to look at third party products like Zinc that provide a wrapper
in which you may be able to provide code to copy the needed files to the user.
Flash can communicate with its wrappers and the wrapper sandbox can be wider.

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Webmaster Forum / Flash / Data Integration / January 2007

Loading local XML file