Am I on the right track?

[Skraut]

It's been a while since I've hung out on FK, and even longer since I've actually used flash. But I had an interesting project dumped on my desk with a new copy of Flash MX so I figured I'd give it a go.

The customer is looking for an online store. The catch is they refuse to move their site to another host. So I'm stuck trying to figure out how to do an online store without any server side scripting.

Fortunately they already process a lot of transactions over the phone, so they liked the idea of recieving a PGP encrypted e-mail and they would process the transactions by hand (expecting less than 100 a month, plus they want to call and verify everything is correct on the order before they make the charge)

But for the rest of it it appears it'll all have to be done in XML. Since there is actually 2 different prices for every product (one for wholesalers, one for distributors, no I don't understand the difference either I was thinking of a structure something like this.

the main page has a login/password slot. This reads an XML file from the sever which would have to be manually edited. That file would have the login/pass as well as the class info for each client.

The site would then load 1 of 2 different XML price lists based on the login. (fortunately they only update their prices once a year or so) Then it could display the product line (which doesn't change and would probably be hard coded into the flash movie) with the appropriate price. It would then take all the ordering information, and then send an encrypted e-mail containing the order.

Just looking for a vote of confidence to see if I'm on the right track, or since I haven't touched Flash since Flash 5, has MX introduced any way of making this easier? It seems that every tutorial on XML/Flash I've been able to find assumes you're using the XML to communicate with a server running some sort of scripting language. Any comments on my plan of action or help along the way would be greatly appreciated.

[tupps]

Well everything you said sounds fine, flash doesn't really care if the XML is in a static XML file or from a scripting language.

As for FlashMX, on the XML side of things haven't changed much except for the speed. FlashMX is 10~100 times faster for parsing XML data (string functions are now parsed by the Flash Player, not written in ActionScript). So basically if you needed to use XML-Nitro before you don't any more (whoohoo!).

The only difficulty I see is getting the encrypted email thingy happening.

Thanks

Luke