Falcon – Adobe Flash 9 AS3 Data Class Replaces URLVariables, URLRequest, URLRequestMethod, URLLoader and URLLoaderDataFormat

Falcon! What a grand code name ;-).

Here is the Falcon ZIP file with instructions and samples.

Falcon is a custom class that wraps the Adobe Flash ActionScript 3 five data classes normally used to access a server script or system such as PHP, Perl, Ruby, ASP, etc. and then of course on to databases like MySQL, SQL Server, etc. It makes it so that you do not have to worry about the URLVariables, URLRequest, URLRequestMethod, URLLoader and URLLoaderDataFormat code.

You pass the following parameters to the Falcon AS3 data class:

• the URL to your server script, text, binary data or XML File
• an optional type of data – Falcon.VARIABLES, TEXT, BINARY or XML_DATA
• an optional data object that holds variables to send to the server

You set an Event.COMPLETE listener to call a function. The event object’s target has three properties. A Boolean error property, a data property and if you use the FalconProvider class there is a dataProvider property:

1. The error property (eventObject.target.error) will be true if connection to the server fails and false if it succeeds.

2. The data property (eventObject.target.data) holds the variables, text, binary or XML that comes back from the server:

• Variables – if your server script sends age=23 and you ask for data.age then you get 23
• Text – for example from a text file just use myTextField.text = data;
• Binary – this is your binary feed (actually untested but should work)
• XML – this a Flash XML object representing the XML from the server

3. Note there are two classes you can use – Falcon and FalconProvider. In FalconProvider, the dataProvider property (eventObject.target.dataProvider) is provided in the variables case when the variables come back in some sort of sequence like name1, age1, name2, age2, etc. FalconProvider automatically provides a DataProvider object with columns of name, age, etc. You can use this for a DataGrid or if you use label1, data1, label2, data2 then you can use it for a List or ComboBox. You must have a component that uses the DataProvider (DataGrid, List, etc.) in the library of your FLA if you use the FalconProvider class.

4.  Please note that if you use the default Falcon.VARIABLES, then your server script such as PHP must return at least one key/value pair – in the following format  variable=value&variable2=value.  So in a simple example – status=complete.   You cannot have any lines above your <?PHP either otherwise the new line characters cause problems.

5.  If you want to avoid caching issues, put a random number on the end of your script call like so: somefile.php?rand=”+Math.random().

Falcon was created by Inventor Dan Zen. You may use the code as you wish and if possible a credit link to this site will help make the world an easier place ;-). If you are interested in learning to make classes like this or other aspects of interactive multimedia please visit the Sheridan Interactive Multimedia blog for information about its one year post grad college program. Thank you to all at Adobe for such great tools and for our wonderful Flash user group, FITO in Toronto.

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