ActionScript 2.0 :: Managing Large Amounts Of Text / Type
Nov 8, 2006
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.
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 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?
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 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.
AS3 to animate dynamic xml text values to -X direction means left side of the screen. The text boxes will be holding dynamic numbers which willl be basically some amounts passed by the user and these amounts will be animated as running towards left. For getting these dynamic text values from an external XML file every n second say every 5 second the xml connection will be refreshed with a timer. Now am working on is like creating text boxes at run time as per the number of amounts coming to the flash while refreshing once. Here the issue what am facing is like first time when the flash loads then there will be some 10 values so 10 text boxes will be generated and the movieclip holding these will be moving to -x direction with a timer, so when the next time the connection refreshes its again creating new text boxes and appending the movieclip and this process repeats in every refresh, if a new value is coming to the flash may be in 6th refreshing time then to see this new values there is a big delay happening because all the old generated set of amounts has to be moved to see the new one. Here we are looking for a instant change on these amounts once the new values gets to flash.
I am working on a maths game which involves generating some large numbers in AS3. When I pass these numbers into a textbox they appear as e.g. 300000, I would like them to appear as 300,000.Is it possible to format a text box to do this?
I have a very large text file (it's a 270,000 word list with one word per line) which I need to bring into my AS3 code. Importing it via url works just fine - loading it in as a string then converting to an array - no problems.
However, I need to embed it into my code somehow so that there are no external files (for easy distribution). Using a search and replace tool, I've tried several things, none of which have worked including:
Code: Converting to an array: var wordList:Array = ["word1","word2","word3", ...]; Result: crashes compiler too.
The same tests work fine with much smaller sized word lists, but apparently the size of my word list is too large to work. I know flash can handle strings and arrays of this size, because as I said, it works fine when importing the text file via url. I just can't seem to get it to compile it when I embed it into code.
I have this banner that needs to have a several rows worth of paragraph text animate horizontally through it. Ideally, the text should also be possible to update from outside of flash. As for the scrolling text, working with that much text as one long row of letters doesn't seem feasible, so I'm wondering is there a standard way in Flash CS5 of working with large amounts of animated text? Not the user editable kind like text fields and such, but presentational text.
Obviously it's not efficient to have one long string of text that extends several screens beyond the display, as is the case now. Editing just one letter can take several seconds of scrolling as the string is currently over 3000 px wide, and it's not even all the text that's going to be in the final animation. It'd be great if it was possible to type that text through some web based cms, and have it automatically transferred to the Flash banner,
how to display a large amount of text inside of Flash CS4. I have a 46 page pdf I would like to display but I would really like to keep it internal to Flash...I don't want to link it out to a separate html page if I don't have to (i.e. through a URLRequest). I would like to have one self-contained swf file.
I understand that, in order get an anti-aliased font in a dynamic text field, the most given advice is to embed the font. But that doesn't work for my project since we want to make it available in multiple languages, and there are too many fields that must be embedded, and it greatly increases the file size of just one scene.
The other option I have seen people use is to custom anti-alias, but for some reason, this option just is not working for me. I fiddle and fiddle with the sliders, and no change is ever made. We are only using Arial, so I am at a complete loss as to why I seem to get no changes in the text from this option.
shed light on what might be blocking me from using custom anti-alias in my flash files?
I am embedding the sowpods dictionary into an array in AS3 then submit searches using indexOf() to verify existence of the word. When I load a smaller text file it seems to work but not the larger. Since the file is embedded during compile, there shouldn't be an event for loading to listen to right?
Code:
package { import flash.display.MovieClip; public class DictionaryCheck extends MovieClip {
My current little problem, which I believe is my last one (yay) involves feedback. I've got a frame at the end with a list of the questions and whether or not the user got it right. I've set up two little arrays, one with the question number (because this is a random quiz) and one with corresponding indexes saying whether it was correct or incorrect (well, true or false at the moment). The intent is to associate the question number with feedback (either stored in AS or XML) and return it when the answer was wrong. All that side of it I can do, that's not the problem.
The problem is... I have very little idea on how to display this info! I'd use a dynamic text box, but I don't think you can put line breaks in them (without using HTML coding). I have been thinking about either manually or dynamically creating dynamic textboxes (or mcs with textboxes in them) and then adjusting the text, but the designer side of me cries when faced with the problem of some feedback having one line, with others having three (and everything in between).
So I have extended my textfield so I can add a some text, a style, an x and y position.
var clientText:MyTextField = new MyTextField("Client:", "style1", 75, 60); addChild(clientText);
The problem is the text is starting to get a bit long and I need a way to insert large amount of text neatly. I don't really want to use xml I would prefer to just have it in the ide like in the attached image. However formatting it in this way gives me the error
I'm running into a brick wall here. My dictionary.txt file, which is loaded into ActionScript and shoved into an array, cannot be uploaded by the licensing company to license my game. However, I wrote a program to convert the space-delimited text file into an .as file, looking like so:[code]Thing is, now the .as is 3MB in size, and all ActionScript in the game fails to load.So I either need two things:
- Some way to embed the .txt file within the .swf
- Some way to make the .as file load without issues.
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.
So I'm working on some localization stuff and I'm using the fl.lang.Locale library in AS3/CS5. I am using the strings panel, and can get stuff to the XML files in the proper XLIFF formats.I am attempting to be able to swap out text (and eventaully assets) at run time using the "Replace strings: via ActionScript at runtime" setting.As it is, I have to reference every text field directly by instance name. I have begun to place those text fields into a Dictionary to line them up with their proper IDS.I have 2 questions.
1) is there a better way to replace all of these text fields? there are a LOOOOOT of text fields spread out across many many scenes. Is there a built in "change all fields" function somewhere that I'm missing?
any good tutorial in which visitors can type a simple text in a text field for example, and that text while writing is automatically applied on the background image. And if they want,they can save it on their computer.
I'm trying to build an RSS feed reader to display inside a swf on a webpage. I need to figure out how to create the RSS feed reader as it's the last bit I need to create for this website.
Here's the code I'm using:
var rssLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader(); var rssURL:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://teachercenter.scps.k12.fl.us/education/rss.php?sectiondetailid=69411"); rssLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, rssLoaded); rssLoader.load(rssURL);
[code]....
I keep getting an error message that reads:
1061: call to a possibly undefined method addItem through a reference with a static text type flash.text.Textfield.
best way to read in like 200k words and have them each tween from the center of the screen as small dots and tween up to the word filling the SWF then "fly through my head" not literally, but you probably get it...
(Flex 3) I have a TextArea component which needs to hold the user's clipboard content. The TextArea does the job relatively well for most cases but when pasting a large amount of data, I can't seem to get the content in the component at all due to the script execution timeout.
I've done a fair deal on investigation to try and hopefully find how I could make this work. I found that the TextArea is using a IUITextField (which is in my case an instance of TextField at runtime) do handle the job of obtaining the pasting data and then throws an event when it is done.
I have found no way to take a look at the source of TextField as it is a class in the playerglobal.swc library.
Is there a way for me to maybe see the source of that class or is there something I'm missing in my approach to figure out a way to make this work?
The searches that I did on this topic aren't providing me with any answers...that I can understand anyway. =*) Here's the situation.In the past, I did computer-based-training using "a different authoring tool." One thing I discovered I could do with that tool--which really opened up new possibilities for me--was to use that scripting language to create a snapshot of the current window and save that image as an object/class. Then I could access that object, resize it, save it to disk, and load it in later. The result--for my training at least--was a visual bookmark of their location in the training should they have to save and come back later.I would now like to do this with Flash.specificially CS4 and AS3.If anyone can point me in the right location to get started,For clarity, the steps are:
1: Take a snapshot of the current Flash window / Stage. I'm not concerned if the snapshot remains "in Flash" or goes to the Clipboard as long as I can get to it in the next step.
2: Access that snapshot from where-ever it's stored.
3: Process the snapshot and reduce it to a thumbnail, etc.
4: Save it to a file that I can bring back into the .swf at a later point. I'm not real concerned about the format of the file as long as I can bring it back in later. How do I save it? I would love to be able to save it to the user's machine but last I checked Flash won't do that sort of thing. Can I save it as a file on the server that the .swf is running from using perhaps a PHP call /script / page?
5: And, of course, recall the image to be used at a later point. I already have a pretty good handle on this from past experiments.
I'm doing some newbie tests, so I decided to capture the keyboard events to move a rectangle. But I don't get the desired result. Unless I click on the TextArea box, I'm not able to capture the event key code. After that, all goes pretty well.
