Flash CD with offline Database

[quazu]

Hey Guys you all seem to know what you’re talking about, basically I need help.

I’m making a flash Interactive educational CD for offline home use. I need a way of calling data from a database on the CD into flash without using a web server. I’m required to use dynamic content so calling the text from a database on the CD should cover that part. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[Northcode]

If you don't need to load all your data at once or the queries you're doing are simple you can have an index.xml file and keep all your rows (or groups of rows) in individual XML files. That way you can search the index for the xml file that has the data you need and load that.

If you have too much data to search through to keep an index around then you'll probably want to use a real database. For that you'll have to turn to a third party tool for help.

Here's a list of commercial ($) third party tools that you might want to check out...

SWF Studio http://www.northcode.com (my baby)
mProjector http://www.screentime.com
SWFKit http://www.swfkit.com
Zinc http://www.multidmedia.com
SWiSH Studio http://www.swishzone.com
Jugglor http://www.jugglor.com

ADO1 shows how to use SWF Studio's ADO plugin to retrieve date from an MS Access database. The ADO plugin allows you to access just about any type of database out there (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Access, etc..)

SWF Studio also has something called the Catalog Plugin that is like a self-contained database built with CSV files. The advantage of the Catalog plugin over ADO is that it will work on any system and it's fast because it caches everything in memory. That's also a disadvantage, you don't want too many MB of data loaded in memory. Check out the Catalog1 example to see it in action. I once created a 70,000 record phone database as a catalog. It was pretty big but searches took less than a second to complete.

Let me know if you have any questions...

[quazu]

thanks Northcode

i can't buy any programs but thanks for the list.

I like the idea of using the xml files. if I was going to write to the xml files would they would need to be saved onto the local computer?

Here’s my idea so far.
(Using flash) without installing anything read and write to a LSO file/s (for a user profile) then use xml files to create dynamic content in the form of multiple choice questions for a flash quiz.

Is my idea even feasible?

[Northcode]

The only problem you're going to have is writing the local XML files. The only place you can save data with Flash alone is in a shared object. The only other option is to send the data you want to save to a script on a web server and save it there. If you use a locally installed web server you could use that to save local XML files.