Load XML file in AIR

So this is the first time I’ve touched AIR (ever!) and I was going about my business trying to use AS3 to load an XML file. If the XML file was not in the same directory as the swf file i was publishing out of AIR (publishing and NOT packaging just yet) it was giving me an ioError so I moved it into the same directory and it worked fine. however, for organizational purposes, i’d like to avoid having it in the same folder as this gets kind of messy.

a friend told me that there is some different way of loading files in AIR and to look up app-resource and app-storage but i havent really found anything too helpful with that.

can anyone shed some light on this or point me in the right direction? thanks!