Developing Flash/Database Interaction using Dreamweaver. Pt III: Updating Records

Again, Dreamweaver will be doing most of the hard work as we see how to create two Flash services to handle the update request sent from our Flash GUI and enable an update function on our existing Flash interface.

While doing this we'll see how to avoid the potential disaster of accidentally creating duplicates of the records that must stay unique (in our example this could happen when we try to modify the username field). We'll also be seeing a couple of tricks about Flash development including how to use Dreamweaver's Server Behaviours to our best advantage.

If you've missed out on the first article on creating a basic authentication mechanism, and the second on building a protected page that extracts information from the database, don't worry as the Flash and PHP source code for the article is available for download.

Creating a PowerPoint Style Presentation in Flash: Pt. 1

This tutorial is the first of a two part series. In the first part, we'll create a presentation using one of the standard templates that ships with Flash. Since we can customise the look and feel of these templates as well as extending them with ActionScript, here we'll extend the presentation by adding rewind and fast forward buttons, including a slide counter that can also be used for navigation and adding a progress bar.

In the second article, we'll add the same keyboard shortcuts that are available in PowerPoint. We'll also create a presentation template. We'll finish by creating a kiosk-style presentation that runs automatically using the setInterval action.

I've assumed that you understand basic ActionScript commands and that you're comfortable adding these to your Flash movies. In the first part of the tutorial, we'll work with some of the events and properties associated with buttons and use input text fields. In part two, we'll learn about keyboard listeners and setInterval.

This tutorial come with a complete code download.

Flash Related Articles on DMXzone

So you've decided that to snazz up your site a little animation is needed. Something a little - ahem - Flashy.

Can DMXzone help you out? Of course we can - check out our array of Flash based articles and see how easy it is to sprinkle some Flash wonder onto your site.

Developing Flash/Database Interaction using Dreamweaver. Pt. II: Viewing Database Records

You may recall several weeks ago, that Alex July asked if you'd ever wanted to build a database-driven Flash application but felt confused by the "database-driven" part? He wondered whether you were scared by the terms "Databinding", "Flash Remoting", "Web Services" and "Delta Packets"?

Well, in the second part of his series, Alex is going to extend the authentication mechanism application he developed in the first article to build a User Management screen that is protected by the authentication mechanism, and provides a neat way of showing how database records can be viewed in Flash.

Please note: This article is based on the first article of the series: Developing Flash/Database interaction using Dreamweaver. Pt I: User Authentication and will continue to develop the application started in that article.

Please note the base files for building today's application are available for download.