screenscrapes or image captures? Turning into image?

[Mechphisto]

Here's a question akin to "Is there a machine that can instatly translate Apple IIe programs into QBasic?"

Is there a way to have Flash (or some addon applet to Flash) screenscrape or screen capture something and turn it into an image? I don't care the format.

What I mean is, I have a tool (see a roughdraft sample at http://www.mechphisto.net/flash/cardtool.swf (ignore the size to fit annoyance),) that allows you to build a postcard.
At the end you get a review of what it looks like.

Right now I have it sending every variable via POST to an ASP page that grabs and submits it to a text file.

What would be cool although I'm sure impossible, is to also take a screen capture of somesort and save it to the server.
Is there anything out there that will allow Flash to do that?


Doesn't hurt to ask, right? =)
Thanks.

[Frank DeRosa]

I can't tell you if the screen-capture is possible. I don't know.

I do know that you cannot save anything to the server from flash without some type of scripting. Flash can only save information on a local machine.

If you're a good php coder, you might be able to tanslate the data you post into image components and assemble them into an image with php, which can then save the image to the server. You could ask about that in the scripting forums. I'm afraid that I don't know enough to help.

Frank

[Mechphisto]

Thanks for the reply! =)

Yeah, I know it's a longshot...but I'm often surprised what modern technology develops while I'm not looking. =)
For example there are add-on components to Flash that allow you to connect to databases directly from Flash (for like $200 I think.)

Thanks again for the feedback!
Liam

[Frank DeRosa]

You're probably talking about coldfusion, which costs more like $800. In the end it's just a scripted interface to the database. You can actually get data from a database with something like PHP, perl, or other scripting languages, and those are free.