Typically, if you want external content in Flash, you link to an external text file, and load it into a text field like so:
lv = new LoadVars();
lv.owner = this;
lv.onData = function(str)
{
this.owner.my_txt.text = str;
};
lv.load("yourTextFile.txt");Quick and dirty, right? Well, Flex does the same thing for you, but without all the work; check this out:
<mx:String id="data_str" source="some.txt" />
<mx:TextArea text="{data_str}" />
Yes, that’s it, I swear! The line between authortime & compile time is blurred so technically this is compiled in, but it remains an external text file you can check into source control & deploy on your webserver, or keep locally.
We use to do that in our flash projects were we put the LoadVars in the _global scope.
The nice thing is that you can ‘bind’ the a value to a TextField’s var attribute.
If you are looking for precompiled-swf deployement and external textfile changes very often, this solution might not be desirable. Because it requires compilation whenever external textfile changes.
But this is a good way to manage source and keep mxml clean. I don’t know much about Flex compiler, but doing this a lot might increase compile time; compiler has to locate, load and compile the content.
-abdul
Using this way, I’ve some problems loading Unicode chars from external file. For example, italian characters like “à à è” are not displayed properly. Giving the value directly to the String is ok, but loading from external file is not good.
If anyone have a solution to it, it would be very appreciate.