XML in Flash

[secretsquirrel]

I wonder if anyone can help me here. This might be a bit complicated and hard to understand...

Imagine I've got a Flash movie containing a map. On this map I want to be able to track the positions of various items moving around the map (indicated by small icons). I would like to pass the positions of the icons into the movie via XML, so the movie could position the icons according to x position and y position variables.

The XML would be structured like this:

<item1>
<xposition>
<yposition>
</item1>
<item2>
<xposition>
<yposition>
</item2>
etc.

Does anyone know of a way to do this?

Let me know if this is unclear...

Thanks in advance.

 

[nimapoggy]

xml parsing works with flash 5 ou higher, tu load a xml file into an xml object, just do this:

yourxmlobject= new XML();
yourxmlobject.load("yourfile.xml");

next you have to go through the object to retrieve nodes values with someting like this :

for(i=0;i<yourxmlobject.childNodes.length;i++){
   //here is just a simple asign of the value of the node to an array item.
   item[i]=yourxmlobject.childNodes[i];
}

A more complete documentation is available on flash support site

http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/action_scripts/objects/xml_object.html

But the thing is that it would be more simple that you write your xml file like this

<?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot;?>
<item id=&quot;1&quot; xposition=&quot;10&quot; yposition=&quot;25&quot; />
<item id=&quot;2&quot; xposition=&quot;12&quot; yposition=&quot;105&quot; />

Note that XML should contain the xml definition tag to be well formed

so you access item atributes with a code like this :

for(i=0;i<yourxmlobject.childNodes.length;i++){
   //here is just a simple asign of the value of the node to an array item.
   itemid=yourxmlobject.childNodes[i].attributes.id;
   item[itemid]._x=yourxmlobject.childNodes[i].attributes.xposition;
   item[itemid]._y=yourxmlobject.childNodes[i].attributes.yposition;
}