On a previous post I talked about the basics of XML so I thought I’d show some examples of how to incorporate XML with Flash.
Since XML is primarily used to store and transfer data, it makes for a nice flexible way to store data that Flash applications can use. Since it’s external to your SWF file, it can be easily updated. So whether your Flash application pulls in data for a News Reader or a Slide Show or Music Juke Box, any change will be dynamic and ready to go.
These examples use ActionScript 3.0, which allows for easier manipulation of XML data compared to previous versions of AS. I broke up the three examples into three parts so you can see the evolution of each example and can follow it better with a gradual change in the AS code (saved as Flash CS3).
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Raw XML is rarely suitable for direct presentation, and frequently must be organized, or transformed, to suit the needs of a specific output device. The most widely used option for this is XSLT. Older techniques such DTD and Schemas can be used as well, but as discussed in my first post about XML, XSLT was specifically created for this and should be used when possible.
XSLT provides an effective procedure – a tree transformation process – for manipulating XML at the level of elements and attributes. A special-purpose language, XSLT has features that simplify that task of defining transformations of XML.
Here is the xml file (.xml) that is used throughout the explanations.
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XML (Extensible Markup Language) is based on the same parent technology as HTML or XHTML. XML looks a lot like HTML, complete with tags, attributes and values. But rather that serving as a lagnguage just for creating web pages, XML is a language for creating other languages. You use XML to design your own custom markup language and then you use that language to format your own documents. Your custom markup language, officially called an XML application will contain tags that actually describe the data that they contain.
If a tag indentifies data, that data becomes available for other tasks. A software program can be designed to extract just the information that it needs, perhaps join it with data from another source, and finally output the resulting combination in another form for another purpose. Instead of being lost on an HTML-based web page, labeled information can be reused as often as neccessary.
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