Loading New Dynamically

programming flash
1

This is kind of 2 questions in one but here it goes:

I’ve followed all the tuts on loading an external text file into a text box in a flash movie and that is fine, even the one with the scroller. However I am trying to set up a site where my writers can just upload their news and it pops up on the site, but I don’t want to have to upload it myself and change the actionscript to match up with all the article names. Basically what I want to know is if there is a way for my writers just to follow a naming pattern i.e. news1.txt, news2.txt etc and for the site to keep posting them without overwriting the other previous news post. I was thinking this could be easy by using a loop and an array but I dont know how to do this with actionscript. Like the loop could increment variable i by 1 every time an article was posted and the news files could be named news*.txt and the writer could just look through the files and see which number to name the next news file. I hope that explained it good enough, if not then I will try to explain it better.

Question 2:
Is there any way to include links and/or pictures in a news post if the flash site is loading it from an external file. I know the html commands to do this on a regular site and can figure it out with actionscript but will the flash site actually read the code and make the link or post the image?

Thanks for all your help everyone.

2

For the situation of both questions, I think it would be better if you would use a database like MySQL for news storage. Maybe even store every text of your site in it.

The great thing about using MySQL together with the administrative tool phpMyAdmin is that the user can just press “Insert” and start writing a new piece of text for the news section. You can also have a date field, in which the user just selects CURDATE(). That way, the entries can easily be sorted by date.

PHP can then retrieve the entries and write the data out as XML (Jubba wrote a great tutorial on that). Flash can then read that XML file and display the text in a textfield.

In fact, I’ve created this exact news updater a week ago. It’s not hard at all, and it’s awesome to keep your site updated. All the user will have to do is surf to a URL, input user name and password and edit some text or type in new text or delete text - anything they want. They are being dynamically loaded into Flash, so there should be no cache problems either.

You can also place urls to images in the database. They will then also be read by PHP and written in the XML file, which Flash will read. Flash can then load the image dynamically using loadMovie.