Saving "button pressed" data to outside source

[mike]

I am working on a program in flash where the user can click a button and that button saves a unique string (or something to identify which button was pushed) into an outside txt (or any common type) file. I have looked into the saving information tutorials here and have not been able to create it my way (without typing or selecting something). I hope that is not confusing, I am pretty new to flash scripting, any help is much appriciated. Thanks.

-Mike

MSN IM:
drakefulter@hotmail.com

[bpat1434]

Ok.  How about defining the variables for the button strings:

[script]
button1var = new String("001100011100110101010010011");
button2var = new String("010100100111001101010011101");
button3var = new String("Whatever information you want....");
button4var = new String("More information about stuff.........");[/script]

Then when the button is pressed, use what the tutorial says to save the information to a text file:

[script]on(release){
    myData.buttonString = buttonXvar;
    myData.sendAndLoad("save.php", myData, "POST");
}[/script]

In a general area:

[script]myData = new LoadVars();
myData.onLoad = function(){
    if(this.writing=="OK"){
        gotoAndStop(SomeFrameNumber);
        status.text = "Saved Successfully";
    }else status.text = "Not Saved";
}[/script]

Then as your PHP script:

<?php
 //Capture data from $_POST array
$string = $_POST['buttonString'];

//Make one big string in a format Flash understand
$toSave ="UniqueString=$string";

//Open a file in write mode
$fp = fopen("new.txt", "w");

if(fwrite($fp, $toSave)) echo "writing=Ok&";
else echo "writing=Error&"
fclose($fp);
?>


That should work.  Hope it helps.

~Brett

[mike]

that seems to work well, thanks brett. I also have the flash file to read outside images and display them. However it only refreshes when someone clicks a button, is there anyone to have flash read the script again and again to keep the images up to date, or possibly have it refresh after a user selected amount, say 5 seconds?

[bpat1434]

you could define a function to read the images (like you already have set-up) and at the top add this code:

[script]function refreshImages(){
     whatever code to refresh the images
    loopmc.play(); // Play the timer loop movie again
}[/script]

Add that function and whatever code youhave to initially read the images.  Then create an empty movie clip (with nothing in it except action frames) and add something like this:

loopmc
frame 1
[script]i = 30; // Amount of seconds/loops to do
cl = 1; // Current Loop Number[/script]

frame 2
[script]if (cl == i){
    _parent.refreshImages(); // call the function if cl & i are the same
    gotoAndStop(1); // Go to beginning of loop
} else {
    gotoAndPlay(3); // Otherwise, keep looping through
}[/script]

frame 13
[script]cl++; // Add 1 to the current loop count
gotoAndPlay(2); // Make another loop[/script]

That loops through for every second.  Now, if you wanted to do it at a user defined interval, you would write to a variable, and call that from the loops action script.  So, you could write:

_global.i = userInputText.text;

Then, i would be whatever the user inputs, and any movie can read the i variable.

Hope that helps.  I'm sure there are easier ways to do it, but this is a way that works for me.

~Brett