PHP and Flash

[WMS]

A question. Does anuone know if there is any article on this site about interaction between PHP and Flash. And with that I mean passing parameters to a Flash animation.

Let me be more specific. It's fairly easy to have a script pull data from a database and e.g. have a variable number of elements (e.g links) on a generated web page.

I'm designing a website where the site adminstrator can influence the layout of the site by adding, modifying or deleting pages and at the same time can add, modify or delete links on an index page to reflect the modification of the layout.
I as a designer don't have to know in advance how many pages an administrator wants to add and thus how many links an administrator wants to put on the index page. As far as I'm concerned the administrator can go on indefinitely.

But what if I want the index page to consist of a Flash animation. Surely I can pass parameters to a Flash animation with the "getUrl" function, where the paramaters are contained in a data file or I can pass the parameters like
demo.swf?par01=http://some.url.com . But it seems to me, that I have to design the Flash animation with a pre-defined number of elements and layers to receive the parameters. In other words, in contrast to the HTML page, I can't go on indefinitely. There will always be a limit on the number of parameters the animation can receive. I can, of course, pre-define a large number of elements but that seems a waste of resources.

Are there any ideas on how to handle something like this. BTW I'm still using Flash 4.0. Is my reasoning wrong? Are Flash 5.0, Flash MX or Adobe LiveMotion 2.0 better equiped to handle something like this?

I would be interested in learning your ideas about this.

Best regards,
Henri Witteveen

[kamstar]

hi there.
try this link:
http://actionscript-toolbox.com/samplephpmysql.php

its a tutorial on flash interaction with php and mysql.
you could use the database to store your parameters.

with regards to flash 4/5, the above tutorial is for flash 5. it might be worthwhile scanning the sitepoint flash forum on specific details.

hope this helps,
k

[bbolte]

actionscript was changed a bit in flash 5 from flash 4, flash mx builds on this. the changes were for the better, macking actionscript more in line with ecma (i believe that is the right term) standards. you can do it in v4, but 5 and mx are more suited...