Chapter 11. Getting Data In and Out of Flash

One of Flash's most useful features is its ability to communicate with external sources. Being able to send and receive data to and from other locations makes Flash a real application development tool: It enables you to do things like load news dynamically, facilitate user log in and registration, and build Flash chat applications.

In this lesson, we'll show you the various ways Flash is able to send and receive data. You'll then use this knowledge to build a simple Flash polling application that lets you vote for a movie and then displays the poll results, as well as a journal that saves entries to your hard drive.

This journal application (which you'll create in this lesson) will allow you to add new entries, browse all previous entries, and save entries for later.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

In this lesson, you will:

• Learn about the types of data format that Flash can load

• Learn about the objects designed for data transfer

• Send and receive data from a server

• Save data to your hard drive using shared objects

APPROXIMATE TIME

This lesson takes approximately 1 hour to complete.

LESSON FILES

Media Files:

Lesson11/Assets/poll.asp

Lesson11/Assets/poll.mdb

Starting Files:

Lesson11/Assets/poll1.fla

Lesson11/Assets/journal1.fla

Completed Projects:

poll2.fla

journal2.fla

Bonus File:

Lesson11/Bonus/highscoreList.fla