Flash MX 2004 Games : Art to ActionScript

Flash MX 2004 Games
65 Response.Write(str);
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67 conn.Close();
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69 %>
Listing 21.11
ASP pages are an easy way to link between Flash and a database. Because you can write ASP pages
in JavaScript and that is the syntax used in ActionScript, you are already well on your way to
becoming a JavaScript expert.
Creating administrative pages
The administrator for your site will want to be able to read and manipulate the database. SQL
Server is very good for maintaining a remote database, Access is more limited. Sometimes the best
way to create an easy-to-maintain site is to create admin pages. Such pages are designed to allow
the administrator to check such features as traffic and users. We have found that cunning players
often find ways to fake a high score, sometimes by sending a score directly to the database using
the ASP pages that Flash uses. This happens particularly on prize-winning games. To avoid this
happening we have taken to using encryption techniques for most data that we send by ASP. The
Webmaster can often spot someone cheating simply by checking his or her records in a database.
Flash is a good tool for creating user-friendly front ends to allow a Webmaster to check out the
database. The ‘admin.fla’ project shows how you can tie a Flash application to a database. The
‘Grid’ component has three parameters, rowCount, colCount and colNames – an array of strings.
These can be set directly at design time or you could create ASP pages to get the total number
of columns and the names from a table in the database. Having accessed this information you can
use it to initialize the grid to the appropriate column headers and the appropriate data in the cells.
You could create a button that allows users to delete or update records. You could even let users
write their own SQL strings and then use these to update the database. By linking Flash and ASP
pages in this way you can provide all the functionality a Webmaster could ever need.
Summary
Flash MX 2004 is a great tool for linking to server-side scripts. Because we can get data out of Flash
using a query string or the POST method, we can easily send this to a server-side script. On the
server we can use the data to manipulate a database then send this information back to Flash using
a MIME-encoded string. We can send as many variables in this way as are needed for a particular
task. There are many books on ASP, a lot of which use VBScript as the scripting language, so you
may find them unfamiliar at first but a lot of the detail will be the same if you use JavaScript as
your scripting language.
In this chapter we explored more fully some of the features of ASP and SQL. If you are
manipulating databases then it well worth learning more about SQL. The language offers you a
great many tools for selecting records from databases and linking together tables. Check out the
bibliography for some interesting SQL books.
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