Iterative session transcript query

[Phil Swallow]

Hello - I am somewhat new to Flash MX and have an early prototype page at http://www.reframe.net/clqonweb.htm which does part of what I want and I don't know how to do the next bit.  I have looked far and wide upon the net and now I hope someone here can help.

I am a psychotherapist/coach and the page I have put together contains a series of questions from a therapeutic/coaching process called Clean Language.  One of the things we know from our working experience is that even when you know what a question will be, hearing someone else ask you that question makes a difference, somehow.  

So the page is designed to allow someone to have questions asked of them by a (mostly) human voice (mine).  It achieves this already, after a fashion - it needs design work and other improvements (this is a first prototype - I promise my voice will be less stilted next version).

My second intention is for the user to be able to:

click on the question they want to be asked,
hear it asked,
type in a reply, then
choose another question

and so on until they have either worked out whatever they want to work out or got sick of my voice.

The third outcome I have in mind is that at the end of the session, I want the user to be able to print out a transcript of the whole session that reads sequentially 'question 1, response 1, question 2, response 2,' etc, as if it had been an actual face-to-face rather than a face-to-screen session.

I can happily work out the looping in the timeline and so on. What I don't know is how to build up this transcript because if I use variables in a loop, I imagine the variable will be overwritten each time.  I saw a reference to a local shared object which might be useful since it resides clientside so privacy is pretty assured.  It would be okay if the text needs to go to a text file, a database or array on the server though.

Essentially the transcript is a list that alternates between the last question asked by my recorded voice (I use the text of the question as the button for that spoken question so I should just be able to use that) and the last response typed in by the user to a box.

My apologies if this is not very technical - I hope someone can at least give me a clue where to be looking.  I suspect we are looking at some of the technology of forms, variables, a scripting language like PHP?

I will apreciate any help you can offer.

Thanks

Phil Swallow

[Musicman]

Hi Phil,

you are perfectly right with the local sharedobject - it can accumulate responses and keep them, in case the visitor wants to stop and continue later (or in case the computer stops on them by itself)
The technical construct you want to use is an array - whenever a new question / response  is there, push them onto a list (like put another sheet of paper on top of a pile)
If the array is part of a SO, you would flush (save) that after every resonse.
You probably dont need any server script here - but maybe sending the text to a server and getting back a printable browser window might be better than printing from flash

Musicman

[Phil Swallow]

Thanks - I appreciate the quick response - it's good to know that what I want to do is possible.  I am new to scripting and don't know how to send things to an array - is this related to the GET or POST choice I have seen people discussing?  How does it add each question response so that it does not erase the previous?

Is there a tutorial I could work through, rather than use up bandwidth with dumb questions here?

Thanks again

Phil

[Musicman]

Hi,

say the current question is variable qno and the response is variable (textfield) reply, you would use code like
sess = []; // create empty array

sess.push({q:qno, r:reply}); // store response

If you are using a sharedobject, you would have

so = sharedobject.getlocal("sess");
if(typeof(so.data.sess) == 'undefined')
  so.data.sess = [];

so.data.sess.push({q:qno, r:reply}); // store response
so.flush; // save to file as well

The GET and POST bits are for talking to a server - if you want to send transcript of a session, you will have to use POST

Musicman

[Phil Swallow]

You star - thanks for this - I'll let you know how I get on.

Cheers again

Phil