Sending Flash Form Data to Excel File?

[nathanwf]

Note *** This will not be running online. This will be running from a CD locally. So no PHP.

The flash file will be turned into a projector file(exe). Clients will be filling out a survey that will be send to the excel file. I am looking to have a flash form send all it's information to an excel file. Will also need to have the files be updated when a user outs there ibfo. What are the best ways to getting this done?

[MyFriendIsATaco]

You won't be able to do that with just a project file. You're going to need to use AIR and put some serious work into figuring out how to structure an XLS file properly to save one out. I wouldn't imagine that a class already exists for this.

Is there a reason this has to generate an Excel file? The best bet I would think would be to export out a CSV list. Then that can be at least loaded into Excel and handled properly.

[Musicman]

Hi,

will your excel or whatever file reside on the cd as well - or are you planning to collect responses from multiple people (each one running the cd) in one place (such a common place could have php)?
BTW: one of the bad things about exe files - the viewer needs to run windows to use them

Musicman

[nathanwf]

thanks for the quick reply. the form needs to be able to be either saved to an excel file (or supported format) or mailed out.

[nathanwf]

Hi,

will your excel or whatever file reside on the cd as well - or are you planning to collect responses from multiple people (each one running the cd) in one place (such a common place could have php)?
BTW: one of the bad things about exe files - the viewer needs to run windows to use them

Musicman

thanks Musicman...the file will be place on a CD. it will be ran on Windows at all times since the client will be running it on their pc and having their clients fill it out in front of them. it would be a lot easier doing it online, but they want to be able to travel around with their laptops. they wont be connected to the internet at all time, which would make it better if they could save the xls file.

[nathanwf]

or cvs file...whichever can open up in excel and seems to be the most commonly used.

[MyFriendIsATaco]

CSV just stands for Comma separated values. It's a pretty common and universal file for data. So you can look into the specs of that since I'm not aware off hand to get things from that into a format Excel likes.

And you're still going to more than likely need to wrap your application in AIR. Just the projector running on the CD isn't going to have enough privileges to write a file to the file system. If it's wrapped in AIR, you'll have the permissions you need and the application will actually be installed on the computer like normal applications.

[nathanwf]

thanx a lot...will try that out

[Musicman]

Hi,

the way you describe the scenario, how about using a flash local shared object (translates into a .sol file) for data capture?

Musicman

[nathanwf]

not much of an expert of areas outside of flash...air would not be a good solution since the client doesnt want to have to install another program to run it. is there any sites with examples of how to make this form?

[chaitanyabhure]

Hi Musicman, Nathanwf, MyFriendIsATaco

I am Chaitanya & have the similar kind of requirement. We are into Business Intelligence & have created a dashboard for one of our client. Dashboard is an SWF file generated through a tool named Xcelsius which uses Excel file as an underlying data & builds SWF file as an output. Our client wants an user annotations functionality in it wherein multiple users should be able to input/annotate certain values in Dashboard...which is not possible in our tool so we came up with a solution to submit text through Flash file to Excel file that can be fetched to SWF & can be shown as comment.

[Northcode]

Hi chaitanyabhure, is your SWF running as a projector (EXE file) or is it running online?

[chaitanyabhure]

Hi Northcode,

My file will be a projector file. Lemme just dig, how this SWF is being created. I work on Business object & xcelsius works on XL sheet - its a tool to create Business Dashboards for CXOs in a company. We create a dashboard using available controls like, Slider, charts, graphs, alerts bla bla bla which in turn use Data from an underlying XL sheet. This is a scenario where in we have implemented Google Maps in it & provided some inf of Lat-Long given by a client. Objective behind it was just to view the street view of places where they have implemented their products/services. They usually monitor this using their own calculations about how a particular service is going in particular area. So using the same base of information we had, we applied few alerts on that SWF file which is nothing but an output of Xcelsius tool. Now client want those service locations annotated by putting in few comments (Good/Bad) so that other field workers can follow few parameters & look into those locations to know why the service is not going good & possibly fix the issues by going through the comments that have put in.

Since there is no such functionality of Write Back to Data Source, provided in Xcelsius we are trying to achieve this objective by some work around. Since I am not a swf developer...

Please provide me some insights if you can, would really appreciate.

Thank you very much...

[Musicman]

Hi,

unlike last time, you do not only talk about saving data back, but also about fellow workers who would want to look at the data (and perhaps even add more annotations). How about installing a (perhaps intranet) website where the swf can store the comments?

Musicman

[Northcode]

Yeah, there are ways to save and load data but if you have to do it and give others access to the data in a shared environment, your best bet is to send data to/from a server where everyone can access it.