Flash XML processing

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Flash XML processing is not a complicated task at all. In this article I will show you how to load and process XML files via actionscript.

Tutorial info:

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Step 1 - XML basics

Flash XML processing

Nowadays XML is very popular. Storing data in XML format makes it platform independent and various applications can process it easily. Of course Flash also has built in routines to help us working with XML files. 

In this article we will use an XML file which describes a photo gallery. The XML stores the title of the photo and the image file location. It look like this:

Code: 
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<gallery name="Photo gallery">
    <image name="Picture_1" location="gallery/photo1.jpg" />
    <image name="Picture_2" location="gallery/photo2.jpg" />
    <image name="Picture_3" location="gallery/photo3.jpg" />
</gallery>
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The first line defines the XML format and the real data begins from the second line. In this example we have a gallery with 3 images. To be safe you should save your XML files in UTF-8 format, else Flash can have some problem with the file.

Now it's time to make some actionscript. First of all we need to create a special XML object. This object will handle our XML file. The code is the following:

Code: 
var myPhoto:XML;
myPhoto = new XML();
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After we have created our XML object we can call its load() function to load our XML file as follows:

Code: 
var myPhoto:XML;
myPhoto = new XML();
myPhoto.load("gallery.xml");
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XML files can contain nodes that contain only white space. These nodes can cause some troubles so we need to ignore them. Fortunately we can do it quite easy just setting the ignoreWhite parameter to true:

Code: 
var myPhoto:XML;
myPhoto = new XML();
myPhoto.ignoreWhite = true;
myPhoto.load("gallery.xml");
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In the next section we will process the loaded file.

Tags: flash xml processing, actionscript xml processing, flash xml, actionscript xml, flash, xml

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