Webmaster Forum / Flash / Data Integration / July 2008

Hello,

Make your textfield read HTML by clicking on the Render text as HTML option in
the Properties panel.
Concatenate the variable that holds the URL from your XML file to a string
that will be read into the textfield as HTML

// Lets say that your one of the nodes in your XML file looks like this
<link title="Google" url="http://www.google.com" />

// Then you retrieve the url and title attributes like this
var rootNode = xmlObj.firstChild.childNodes;
var linkURL = rootNode.attributes.url;
var linkTitle = rootNode.attributes.title;

// Concatenate the string with HTML tags
var link:String = "<a href="+linkURL+">"+linkTitle+"</a>";

// Feed it to your textfield using the htmlText method
myTextField.htmlText = link;

Hope that helps

I looked at CSS but I am using Flash 5 and I can't get it to work.  That would
be ideal.

For now I'm ok with this approach.  However, I tried your solution and it
pulled in the headline_text but not the harvest_time.  Any ideas?

I must be close or else it would have not worked at all.

Can you post the portion of your Actionscript that loads the XML file and seperates(parses) the nodes?  I just want to see how the child elements are being pulled out.  Thanks.

function convertXML() {
    if(this.loaded) {
        content_feed_display = "Data loaded.";
    }
    mainTag = new XML;
    elementTag = new XML;
    articleList = new Array;
    elementList = new Array;

    //first get a handle on the first actual element in the document.
    //note we skip to the nextSibling element, since the first element
    //is a document definition tag.
    mainTag = this.firstChild.nextSibling;
    //make sure we have the right parent tag.  Do this by looking at the nodeName
property
    //for this object.  This will correspond exactly to the <nodeName>, where
nodeName is replaced
    //with the name of your xml tag
    if(mainTag.nodeName.toLowerCase() == "moreovernews") {
        //if we have a match, we collect all of the articles beneath it as an array
of xml objects
        articleList = mainTag.childNodes;
        //now we loop over all the articles and look for the tags we are looking
for...
        content_feed_display = "";
        for(i=0;i<=articleList.length;i++){
            //initialize a couple of variables to hold xml data we want displayed
            document_url = "";
            headline_text = "";
            if(articleList[i].nodeName.toLowerCase() == "article") {
                //we get the child node array beneath the articles, aka the meat and
potatoes we are after
                elementList = articleList[i].childNodes;
                //and loop through that looking for the data we need
                for(j=0;j<=elementList.length;j++) {
                    elementTag = elementList[j];
                    elementType = elementTag.nodeName.toLowerCase();
                    if(elementType == "headline_text"){
                            headline_text = elementTag.firstChild.nodeValue;
                    } else {
                        if(elementType == "url"){
                            url = elementTag.firstChild.nodeValue;
                        }
               
                    }           
                }
            content_feed_display += "<p><font color=\"#0C5039\" face=\"verdana\"
size=\"+2\"><a href=\""+url+"\" target=\"_new\">"+ headline_text
+"</a>[B]"+harvest_time+"[/B]</</font><br><br></p>";   
            }
        }
   
   
    }
   
   

}

Hi,

Ahhh -  my suspicions were correct!.  You hadn't declared and assigned
anything to the harvest_time variable in Flash.  The headline_text and url
variables were declared as string objects.  I think this will work now.
 
Find this section in your code

if(elementType == "headline_text"){
headline_text = elementTag.firstChild.nodeValue;
} else {
if(elementType == "url"){
url = elementTag.firstChild.nodeValue;
}

and add this under it

if(elementType == "harvest_time"){
harvest_time = elementTag.firstChild.nodeValue;
}

Now you can now remove the date variable from this node.

<headline_text>#XMLFormat(news_title)# - #XMLFormat(news_date)#</headline_text>

Just out of curiosity, are you using this variable anywhere else in your
script?

document_url = "";

If not, then you should use that variable instead of the url variable your
using in the code.  Flash actually has the url variable built-in as one of the
methods for the TextField object (e.g TextField.url()).  You might want to
change to avoid any conflicts.

So then you would change it here

if(elementType == "url"){
document_url = elementTag.firstChild.nodeValue;
}

and here

content_feed_display += "<p>...<a href=\""+document_url+"\"
target=\"_new\">"...

Hope all goes good

That's the solution!  Thank you.  I don't know why I missed that... oh well.  I
agree on the usage of url too.  I'll change that up.  Now I'm good to go.

Perhaps you can help me with my newest issue... trying to make a video widget
using Flash MX.  :)  Do you think it's possible?