Webmaster Forum / Flash / Data Integration / May 2007

Very true. This is a wide open field of decisions you have to make.

First choice you have is sending via URL variable encoding or XML. That will
define your tasks needed in ASP. As well would you want to simply (most
beginners would) just have the ASP send the URL variables or XML with
Response.write or are you planning a web service type of app.

For Flash you will find the examples in the docs are all you need to get the
data from the ASP and send back if necessary. Still the choices depend on the
server (ASP) choices.

For URL Encoding from ASP:
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/8/main/00002329.html
For URL Encoding to and from ASP:
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/8/main/00002336.html
For XML from ASP: http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/8/main/00002872.html
For XML to and from ASP:
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/8/main/00002879.html
For overall details on data integration

Many folks like using the Flash 8 Pro DataGrid component for a quick UI to
display a SQL select result. You would populate it using
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/8/main/00003263.html.

You can also bind the DataGrid to data providers such as an array so it
updates when the data source changes.

You also can use many of the Flash 8 Pro UI components in a data integration
that binds them to a data connector component:
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/8/main/00000760.html component approach.  
You should review http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/8/main/00000756.html in
the Flash Docs for this approach.

If you need some decisions:

1. Select a scripting language: ASP, PHP, ASP.Net, JSP, Perl, ColdFusion
2. Select the database: mySQL, SQL Server, Oracle
3. Decide how you want to send data to and from Flash (XML, Url variables, Web
Services)
4. Write a server script that can do the database work you want and just use
html forms to prove those scripts out.
5. Look up the docs in Flash for #3 and do the Flash UI.

You might see from this that Flash or HTML would work with the same server
scripts.

Excellent and detailed advice from MotionMaker. I would also add that Flash
remoting, once you get the hang of it, offers a very robust server
communication platform that has the advantage of transfering your SQL result
set in native AS arrays, so there is not serialization. There are
implementations for lots of different languages, but the PHP version is free.
Check out amfphp.org for more information.

Hi,

If you are using ASP.NET and MS SQL Server, I'll be more than happy to email
you .Fla source files, as well as ASP.NET pages and a sql database, so you can
see how it's done. Also, depending how much traffic your application is going
to get, you might consider either publishing the data to an XML file for Flash
to read using the XML class or calling an ASP.NET page that connects to the
server everytime you hit your application using the LoadVars class.

Jaime

So far my best experiences doing this have been with Web Services. I just prefer to use an ASP.NET Web Service to run my queries and have flash connect to it.