Cache problems with ie

[strenge]

Howdy.
I realize there have been other posts concerning this. My problem is that I've tried most if not all of the solutions that have been suggested. Let me say up front that I'm not a flash developer at all, but I'm trying to get a movie to interface with some dynamic content (cold fusion in this case).

We're using flash 4; the flash movie needs to be able to read in either: the contents of a text file; or, the output of a script. Then, it uses that text in the display. No problem, both approaches work.

The problem is that Internet Explorer 5 will not reload the swf after the text file (or script output) has changed. I've tried the following solutions:

1. putting meta tags to force no cache
2. adding "?id=<random string>" to the link to the swf
3. copying and renaming the swf ("<unique id>.swf") and loading this file instead of the original.

No luck. Even using the "new" flash files, which to me is really bizarre. Any suggestions? We don't want to use flash 5. Thanks for any info you can provide.

Rick

[creativeflow]

I'm not sure if what you are doing is what I think you are doing but here goes.

I do allot of flash work that involves using server side text files for dynamic content, when the content of the text files change it isn't reflected in the flash movie. The easiest way around this is to use a cgi script to read the text file and output the text to flash.

Cheers,
Clayton

[frogsOVERtheEAST_moon]

i encountered the same cache problem not too long ago. in my problem-ridden case i had a flash file that interacted with a .txt via an .asp. the .asp file was named setValue.asp and worked by appending "?value=on" or "?value=off" to the url and thus updating the .txt file appropriately. this process worked properly the first time around but once the urls were called a second time (i.e. turn on, turn off, turn on again) the process failed. i could not get the cached urls to update. i gave up.

well, i'm now facing another very similar task and will start building very soon but i've got a new idea. this idea is what i want to share with you.

the architecture of my idea is multileveled. i'm going to write a flash interface that makes javaScript calls to the HTML page its embedded in that, in turn, make calls to an applet on the same page that i'm going to write that will update the data source. i'm thinking that this structure will completely bypass the browser and therefore bypass caching issues. what do you think? can you think of reasons why this may or may not work? have you found an easier and more direct way?


.ali

[strenge]

Ok. One of our guys here who actually does the flash work (as mentioned, I do CF/ASP etc) found some good info here on this site that helped out. One idea we had was to pass the values into the Flash Movie as parameters. We just didn't know if this was possible, or how to do it.

By passing CF variables into Flash variables, there is no cache problem. Here's our code:

<!--- set variable in CF --->
<CFSET linez = "line1=drivelonymous&line2=wangles&blah=Blazzoooie !!" >

<!--- pass the "linez" var into flash as parameter string --->
(this stuff is inside flash object)
<PARAM NAME=movie VALUE=Textflash.swf?<CFOUTPUT>#linez#</CFOUTPUT>> <PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=high> <PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#FFFFFF> <EMBED src=Textflash.swf?<CFOUTPUT>#linez#</CFOUTPUT>
(continue flash object code)

Hopefully the CF code isn't confusing. This works with ASP, PHP, any CGI etc. The contents of the CF variable could be read from a db, text file, form submission etc.

Thanks for the replies and info.
Rick