ActionScript 2.0 :: Importing Large Amounts Of Data?
Sep 12, 2006
I'm currently using XML to import geo-location data to my flash application.Even though my XML scheme is about as small as can be, I still feel i would do better downloading the variables as text and exploding them. If i manage to change the xml to raw text I can compress the data to about 35% of the original size.I want to load the data in the form a_b_c_d-e_f_g_h.So, to the question; how do I explode a datastring in flash?
Im not sure whats the best way is to make large amounts of data available to my android app on the local device.
For example records of food ingredients, in the 100's?
I have read and successfully created .db's using this tutorial.[url]...
However to populate the database I use flash? So this kind of defeats the purpose of it. No point in me shifting a massive array of data from flash to a sql database, when I could access the data direct from the as3 array?
So maybe I could create the .db with an external program? but then how would I include that .db in the apk file and then deploy it to users android device.
Or maybe I create a as3 class with an xml object init and use that as a means of data storage?
how "you" would do it and then deciding my strategy from there.What I'm setting out to do is as follows:I have a UI with about 10 sliders and 10 buttons.I'm using Senoculars Virtual Mouse class to record all of the users interactions into arrays (basically [x,y, action, time, value]) and then after a decided time (say 3 minutes) I play the users interaction back to them.All of that works fine but now the data is not persistent.I would like to be able to store the interaction data somewhere and then a user can log out, log in and view their previously saved interaction.how would you go about saving this data? I was thinking about storing it in a XML file but I'm concerned that the file would wind up being ridiculously huge. If a user drags a slider from left to right just once thats saving [x ,y action, time,value] 42 times.
I'm currently working on a project where I generate a large amount of audio data to be stored on a users machine.
It works fine for small amounts of data but as the memory usage grows the flash application begins to struggle and eventually dies.
I've been thinking about possible ways to overcome this problem and I was thinking instead of storing all the data in memory (sometimes up to 100mb) a possible solution may be to stream the data to a server (44100 float numbers per second) as it is is being generated then once the accumulation of data has ended sending it back to the client.
1) can you see any problem with this idea and if so could you offer a better alternative? 2) could you reccommend a good server technology to achieve this?
Edit 1
To add more detail.
I am generating audio on the client using the sound.extract method. As the audio is being sent to the speaker I also send it to a byte array.
Once the user has hit a stop button I prepend a wav header to the audio data in the bytearray and allow the user to download a wav of the audio they have just being listening to.
Ideally I didnt want to impose a limit of how much data the user could save. This may not be possible.Storing all this audio data in memory was causing severe performance problems in flash. I don't know of any way to incrementally store this data on the client machines so I was thinking a solution may be to incrementally stream the data to a server somewhere to reduce the memory load.
What is the best way to work large amounts of external data in Flash? XML, remoting,something else??I'm looking into a project that has a lot and I'm not sure what the best way to handle it would be
I have a web application that functions as a dashboard, allowing a user to see summaries of historical data to view trends, etc. As an extension to this, I want to allow the user to drill-down into the historical data if they so wish.What this will amount to is a table of time-value pairs, showing the time a particular data point was recorded as well as its associated value. The issue is that there could be a very large amount of data on record (millions of points is entirely possible), which means it wouldn't work to load all the data up front and display it to the user.
So far, my best idea is to implement the table of time-value pairs with "infinite scrolling" - i.e. the first x points are loaded and then as the user scrolls down the next x points are fetched and so on until the user reaches the end of the data (with a fixed-size cache of points, so that I don't run out of memory). The issue with this approach, though, is that there's no way to get to the end of the data without first fetching every point in between.
Another option would be to have a navigation interface with forward and back buttons, as well as some sort of date chooser so the user can quickly navigate to any data point they wish. This solves the problem of the first idea, but this navigation interface is far more clunky and less intuitive.My question is: is there some happy medium? A UI where it's clean and easy to navigate through the data but at the same time provide some method of jumping to a specific point in time?
Edits based on comments below:The development environment is flex and the database is SQL Anywhere, though the back-end logistics are less important to me than a clean, functional UI.
how much memory (and swf size) the various built-in data types take up in actionscript 3? I'm specifically interested in int, Number, and (dense) Arrays or Vectors. I'm working on a project where I need to embed large amounts of structured array data, which is already in C++ format, so porting is just a matter of copy-paste, search-replace. I've already had a look at Adobe's lowdown on datatypes but it's not specific enough, and doesn't mention Arrays, etc.
i'm building a site for a pharmacutical company. it's a resource guide. it's essentially a 300 page document, and turning it into a flash site, with links to external pdfs/ppt/doc files. when dealing with so much copy, what is the best way to manage/display it? in the first round of this project, i was simply putting it in flash type, with thumbnail images scattered throughout. it worked, but seemed a little bit archaic. often, with such heavy copy (3 full page scrolls), the thumbnails wouldn't align where i wanted them, and would end up overlapping with text.
I have a component I created that works like a Viewstack but the next index component slides in from one of the four sides. I've got it working well enough that it's acceptable to use, but I want to make it more efficient.
Right now I'm using a Canvas as the base component, I create a snapshot of the current view using an ImageSnapshot (new Bitmap( ImageSnapshot.captureBitmapData( this ) )), and I slide the new index on top of that image on index change.
I'm basically looking for suggestions on how to do this a better way. By taking the Image after the component loads, and after the slide happens, I've gotten the initial jaded moves down to a minimum, but we normally use this for transitioning grids so it's almost always slow on the first or first couple slides.
I use Flash primarily for animation. The project I'm working on currently is a hefty 1920 X 1080 square pixel file and currently weighs in at 187mb because of all the sounds and jpg images.It's 2 minutes long.
The problem occuring is new to me as I've never worked with projects this long or in this resolution. Or with this much data (sound effects, jpgs, etc).
The problem is this: I'm trying to import a high resolution photograph (3500x2500) onto the stage or even just in the library. I'm using the photos to get an idea on where the final animation will be placed (photo backgrounds, flash animation, composited in After Effects, think Roger Rabbit).
I'm importing a large text file and trying to print it with a footer. My method for all of this is very simple. I'm dynamically creating a sprite container that is fed to the the printjob() class. Inside that I'm creating a dynamic text field and scaling it to the right page height/width (408x574) and adding a footer below that.
Using a loop, I'm scrolling the text field to the top of the next page and adding the page number to the footer and adding the page to the job. Mostly, this works fine, but I'm noticing some lines from the text field are not printing. This happens at the page breaks and is not consistent across different printers I use.
I'm developing an application using Flas Builder / Flex for Adobe Air. This application will be processing a large set of static text (100 - 200 MB) using a variable set of processing instructions.The target platforms will be iOS, Android and Desktop.The data set can be either one large XML file or broken into a bunch of XML files about 3MB each.This will be decided at design time.From your experience would it be better to store the text in an Adode Air database or a set of XML files for best performance (including speed and battery life)?What other considerations should I take into account?
Are there javascript libraries that can handle large data visualization? I've seen Protovis, but not sure how much data it can handle. Also, how do Actionscript libraries compare to Javascript in terms of performance?More:I've tried Flare, but seems to be slow for my applictaion. Now I'm yet to figure out if it is the rendering or if it is the shaping of data for rendering. I am looking at interactive graphs like the JobVoyager.
I'm building a sidescrolling world where you can move around.The idea is that you should be able to move to any point in the world, as well as travelling really fast.I'm pregenerating a long list of data about objects to place, their positions etc.
Now. When moving to a point far away from current position I don't want to loop through the whole list of objects to find what objects should be seen and not, so I'm thinking I should divide the position list into sections, each covering an area equal to the visible area. That way I would only have to roll through the lists closets to the new position.This would however result in an array of thousands of elements each consisting of about 20 objects and I'm figuring that might not be very healthy.One solution would be to split everything up further so that in the end I would have a handable nr of arrays containing a handable nr of elements.
You're probably thinking I should generate positions on the fly, but since one place in the world can be revisited I need to store all positions.
I've got a small problem with loadvars. I want to send data from Flash to PHP, which usually works well. But right now I need to send "larger" amounts of data around 10-20kb and loadvars doesn't work anymore.
Using loadvars to open browser-windows seems to work fine, but I want everything to happen inside of flash.
The code is:
Code: datastring = "1, 2, 3 (...) 4998, 4999, 5000"; // long text loadstring = 'save.php?data='+datastring; db = new LoadVars();
[Code].....
Works fine with small text, with big text nothing happens. How to do this the right way?
Edit: Loadvars seems to work up until 4050 characters, 4051 and it doesn't send anymore. But I can't really split the query..
I've run into some problems trying to handle large text files in AIR (300+ MB in size). I can open a filestream and read the file just fine and even store it into a string variable. the problem occurs when i try to manipulate this data. Im trying to get each line as an element in an array so i can manipulate this data.Here's what i've tried:1. read the file into a string variable and perform a split looking for the newline character ). this freezes the program2. i've tried reading the file in one byte at a time and putting each line into an array AS it is being read from the filestream. This not only takes long but eventually freezes.
3. i've tried splitting the final string variable which contains the entire text file into chunks to process it separately.4. i've even tried putting the file contents into a sqlite database, but this also freezes.At this point, im not sure what my options are. Is AIR even equipped to manipulate data at this level? I could use a point in the right direction
I had to manipulate a large number of XML and GIF files. In this case I will need to use a compressed file, like zip. if the flash can access this type of data like the Java do.
I have a large flash project and I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle it. I want to load in an XML file of groups and their members, and a bunch of attributes related to each group and its respective members - but these groups and members are only displayed on screen after a user clicks on their parent groups. My first thought was to just pull in the XML for the whole tree of groups and users, then assign movie clips for the groups, and attach properties related to their display and how the user will interact with them - but if they may never appear on screen, is it pointless to do this? How do I best structure this project? Build an object and attach properties only to the object, then add display data only on click?
Requirement: Create single very large bitmap data which contain some 30 PNG images loaded and for each image it should have some text. Images and text are loaded dynamically (AS2 code. Images are stored in a remote server). The bitmap data display should show 8 images at a time and corresponding text. We can see rest content by scrolling (kinetic scroll is implemented). How can I go for it?Some questions:Is there any limit for size of bitmap data ( As per link there is restriction on the height of the bitmap we can create in AS2 (max value is 2880 which is not enough for some 30 element list If we create individual bitmap data for 30 individual PNG files, we find some jerks in scroll. How can we have smooth scrolling?
I have a large ArrayCollection that need to be displayed in series of Datagrid.After testing, the loading time is around 30secs-1minute.My question here, is there a way to gradually add each datagrid and display it instead of waiting until all datagrids to fully created?Existing :
I'm developing a web application with Flash CS5 and AS3.0. The problem I'm having is this:At a certain state, the application goes to a frame with a "loading..." animation that loops continuously until the next state is reached. The animation is inside a MovieClip that lives on this frame on the stage (I'm not creating or animating it dynamically). While in this state, the app is waiting to receive a large xml file from an XmlSocket connection. The file takes a few seconds (literally - not milliseconds) to be received fully by the Flash player, and during this time the loading animation stops. I believe the socket is blocking the animation thread until it's done receiving the entire file.Does anyone know of a workaround that would allow the animation to keep playing while the socket is receiving? I've seen pseudo-threading hacks, but those always deal with computations or other activities that can be accomplished by calling a call-back function multiple times. Since I'm just listening on an open socket, there's no callback I could pass to a pseudo-thread.
I have stored some basic data in a custom class, imported it into a project, and compiled it into an swf. Now, I want to import that swf into the library of a new, entirely separate flash project, and access the data from the original custom class inside that imported swf.
Here's how I'm trying to go about it (unsuccessfully):
1. Create a custom class 'MyClass.as' with some basic data ("hello world") stored in a property:
Code: package { import flash.display.MovieClip; public class MyClass extends MovieClip{
I would like to import text from a XML file into a dynamic text field. The XML file contains database records. I have found that Flash does not support the DOM command 'getElementsByTagName()' which I was endeavouring to use to find the record in the XML file that I wanted to associate with a particular dynamic text field.
Is there any other way to search through the XML file for the particular record I am looking for?
Im trying to wrap my head around data types and phrasing them from xml. From what I gather variables that come in from XML are always treated as a string - even if you declare them as something else before hand? Im not seeing that myself as everything else other then the Boolean is behaving as expected. For example in the code below, if I declare FGFILLCOLOR as anything other then an int, or Number, I get an unrelated type error. So why just Boolean and how can I convert them so they behave properly without declaring all of them as a String? Though I've seen a few related solutions posted around but I wan't able to sort them out.
In an application we have an excel file of large amount of data whose every row we want as an array of data for impoting into flash application.Here i give a small description what we want to do:
Im trying to wrap my head around data types and phrasing them from xml. From what I gather variables that come in from XML are always treated as a string - even if you declare them as something else before hand?Im not seeing that myself as everything else other then the Boolean is behaving as expected. For example in the code below, if I declare FGFILLCOLOR as anything other then an int, or Number, I get an unrelated type error. So why just Boolean and how can I convert them so they behave properly without declaring all of them as a String? Here is what I've got:
A quick review of the project, I am importing information from an xml file into an array. From there I have passed the information from the array to a variable.I find it that when I try to match the variable to a string letter, that it is not running through the case switch properly and going straight to the default bit. I have tried numerous solution to check where the problem lies;I have trace the actual position of the array to check if it is the correct letter I am trying to match.Did a length check on the variable that it is only 1, and not containing any spacesWhen I hardcode the letter into the variable, the case works perfectly.Any idea on why this is happening would greatly be apreciated. I have pasted a sample of the code below;
var switchTest = initialSlide_array[1]; switch (switchTest) { //switch case used to check template type case "A":
How can I save data to a text file and also append a record to data in an existing text file? I've used Authowrware previously and it was quite easy to create a large string of data (a comma separated list) and export that to a text file (and create the text file if it didn't already exist). I could then easily append additional rows of data (records) to the text file. We want to build a questionnaire that will store the data locally on the computer in a text file. Each record may have a few hundred data points in a comma separated list.
