Topic: Need some flash advice!!

I am new to flash.. in the past i have only use flash for design and animation purposes.. this i have an upcoming project which is to create a game using flash... Could someone tell me the various ways to allow flash connect to a database?? and where find information or help on this??

Thanks..

you might want to look into the XML socket object of actionscript.

other than that flash has no database functions out of the box, but there are probably some libraries googling around.

what kind of database connection are you using and are you able to use a scripting language?

Flash and PHP get along quite agreeably. You might have a PHP script handle the back and forth. Both the LoadVars and XML objects have sendAndLoad methods. You could send a variable or an XML packet to the PHP script which would negotiate with the database. Whatever object you specify as the target of what comes back would "catch" the response.

This is off the top of my head, so it probably wo't work exactly this way, but it gives you an idea of how it works. Let's say you want to send your score to the database, and get back your ranking based on that score. You write a PHP script you call "bridge.php" because it's a bridge between your movie and the database. It's a sort of proxy.

In ActionScript 2 you might write

var senderObj:LoadVars = new LoadVars();

var receiverObj:LoadVars = new LoadVars();

senderObj.score = 100;

senderObj.sendAndLoad("bridge.php", receiverObj, "GET");

So senderObj sends its "score" variable to bridge.php via the GET protocol, and targets receiverObj as the target of what comes back.

What happens in bridge.php is up to you, but that's one strategy for getting data to and from a database with ActionScript. If you are using ActionScript 1 it would be the same, just without the ":LoadVars" bit. And if you expect to get data back formatted in XML, make the receiverObj a new XML object. Works great.