Flash Components - Tutorials - Retrieve Data From XML File

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Posted by : webzo on 03/07/2008 - 1743 pageviews: Awaiting 3 votes.

Retrieve Data From XML File

DOWNLOAD SOURCE FILE FOR THIS TUTORIAL

XML files are a great option to customization in flash; you can simply create a XML and tell your movie to load variables from it.
Let's say you want to create a movie that randomly loads one of three images. But you think that later you may want to add more images or change their path, so you need a XML file.
That's what we are going to do is this tutorial.

First create the xml file:

<xml>  

   <images>

     <a title = "pic1.jpg" />

     <b title = "pic2.jpg" />

     <c title = "pic3.jpg" />

  </images>

</xml>

You can add many more child nodes to <images> as long as you have those images inside the folder.

Save the xml as "images.xml" and create a button in your project.

Give it the instance name of "ranImage" and open the actions for the first frame.
Paste this code:

var images = new XML();

images.ignoreWhite = true;

images.load("images.xml");

ranImage.onRelease = function()

{

        var images_paths = _root.images.firstChild.firstChild.childNodes;

        var ran = Math.round(Math.random() * (images_paths.length - 1));

        _root.createEmptyMovieClip("holder", 1);

        loadMovie(images_paths[ran].attributes.title, "holder");

        _root.holder._xscale = 50;

        _root.holder._yscale = 50;

}

//Here we declare a new XML object

var images = new XML()

//Sometimes white spaces in a xml file can cause problems so we tell our XML object to ignore them

images.ignoreWhite = true;

//load() function, loads our .xml

images.load("images.xml");

Here we declare a variable that corresponds to the child nodes of the <images> node in the xml file.

var images_paths = _root.images.firstChild.firstChild.childNodes;

Now we get a random number between 0 and the length of the images_paths array minus 1.

var ran = Math.round(Math.random() * (images_paths.length - 1))

Create a holder Movie Clip.

_root.createEmptyMovieClip("holder", 1);

Load the image.

loadMovie(images_paths[ran].attributes.title, "holder");

Title is an attribute of this node, so we need to call it like this inside our code:

(node).attributes.title

Scale the image.

_root.holder._xscale = 50; 

_root.holder._yscale = 50;

Try to add more images to the xml; you will notice that they will work exactly as they should.

This could also be very useful to create dynamic slideshows.