PHP and Flash problem - help! - PHPBuilder Forums

PHP and Flash problem - help!

martincrumlish

Hi,

I have a pretty urgent problem. I have developed a simple admin area for a Flash banner for my boss. basically, a form uses PHP to open a text file, display the contents in the text fields and write the contents of the form field to the text field on submit.

The problem is this: The flash banner is going to be sent to a large number of our site affilliates. They will link to to the banner on our server which also has the text files enabling it to be updated dynamiclly via my little form app. However, when a user visits a page with the banner, leaves and then revisits it the flash isnt displaying the latest text file. Instead, it keeps showing whatever was in the file at the time of the first viewing. Obviously this is a cache problem. However, I have no control over the external sites META tags so I cant use a <meta HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">.

The possible workaround I thought of was using a PHP file. In the flash file the text file is obtained through getURL, maybe if I had some PHP file in this getURL instead and in that PHP file there was some variable that called the txt file. Thus it would be dynamic and would not go into the browser cache.

I am stuck with this and its really critical as my boss really wants it done (the pressure is on!) Alternatively, does anyone know of a different solution?

Thanks in advance,
Martin

herve

Hi,

I don't know if it will bypass the cache mecanism
but :

in externals pages :

The script sending back the flash content.

I'm afraid , since the URL is constant, it
will not work, but may be ?

This only way I see is to change the URL, but
that mean having an HTML page build dynamically,
and, of course, you can do that only on your own
site :-]

PS: or may be adding with some Javascript code
a parameter like date and/or time to the
URL above ; that parameter will be ignored
complety by the PHP script but it (the parameter)
will change the referenced URL each time,
avoiding the cache (?)

Hervé.

martincrumlish

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

If I made a PHP file, how could I make it so that it returned the text file as the source for the getURL?

basically, if I put banner.php in the getURL, what should I put in the PHP to make it dynamically load whatever.txt?

herve

Sorry, I don't know flash coding at all

You should check with some tutorials
about PHP & Flash interaction, here :

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/hill20011214.php3

or here :

http://ultimosoft.nullcreations.net/tutorials/php/php6.php

Hervé.

viper21634

Why are you feeding your flash script a var from php??? why not just open the file and read it with flash. That would be the best way to do it.

martincrumlish

Hi,

the problem is: when I use a txt file it keeps getting cached and thus users dont see the up to date content. If I used PHP then it would run the script which would return the variable with the content and this would not be cached.