Streaming Weather

[tweak76]

Does anybody know how to stream weather into your flash movie from an outside source? Any help would be appreciated

[Marty0473]

ummm....
Be a little more specific.

[villain2]

Go to the weather channel's RSS feeds. They'll require you to set up a free account with them.

You can then include the rss into your flash movie.

You'll need to make a php proxy file which will duplicate the RSS feed on your server (flash cannot call the rss page itself from weather.com). Then, write actionscript to call the proxy.php page. Your user can enter a zipcode variable, or you can designate that variable on your own.

Proxy should look something like:

<?php
$zipcode = $_REQUEST['zipcode'];
$handle = fopen ("proxy_load.php", "w");
fputs($handle, "<?php");
fputs($handle, "\r\n");
fputs($handle, "\r\n");
fputs($handle, "\$dataURL = \"http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/" . $zipcode . "?cc=*&dayf=5&prod=xoap&par=yourpar&key=yourkeyfro mweatherchannel\";");
fputs($handle, "\r\n");
fputs($handle, "\r\n");
fputs($handle, "readfile(\$dataURL)");
fputs($handle, "\r\n");
fputs($handle, "\r\n");
fputs($handle, "?>");

fclose($handle);
echo "success=1";

?>

That will write the proxy_load.php file that the Flash movie can read. From there, you simply use actionscript to designate the text fields or input component (whichever you choose) to display the values.

This requires knowledge of parsing xml in actionscript. That is a long and involved process which I'm not going to detail here, but there are plenty of tutorials and books on how to do so.

An example would be:

//Create the XML Object
myXML = new XML()
myXML.ignoreWhite = true
//Load XML file
myXML.load("Weather/proxy_load.php")
//Make a reference to current timeline
myXML.ref = this
// Parse XML and fetch
myXML.onLoad = function(success){
if(success){
var root = myXML.firstChild;
nodes = root.childNodes;
for(var i=0; i<nodes.length; i++) {
subnodes = nodes[i].childNodes
windsubnodes = subnodes[7].childNodes
fdsubnodes = subnodes[2].childNodes
fdiconnodes = fdsubnodes[4].childNodes
sdsubnodes = subnodes[3].childNodes
sdiconnodes = sdsubnodes[4].childNodes
thdsubnodes = subnodes[4].childNodes
thdiconnodes = thdsubnodes[4].childNodes
fthdsubnodes = subnodes[5].childNodes
fthdiconnodes = fthdsubnodes[4].childNodes
orsubnodes = subnodes[1].childNodes
oriconnodes = orsubnodes[5].childNodes
nwindnodes = oriconnodes[2].childNodes

this.ref["Area"+i].text = nodes[1].attributes.id
this.ref["Humidity_txt"+i].text = subnodes[8].firstChild.toString()+" %"

... and so on. Lines like "Humidity_txt"+i mean the blank text field you insert into your flash movie should have an instance name of: Humidity_txt1 and so on.

I'd suggest also using shared objects to allow your users to save their settings, but it's not required.

Like I said, it is a long process, but quite rewarding to finish. It took me about three days to figure it all out.