Duration 2 days

Objectives
XML has become the common method for storing and publishing data for multiple platforms, and for sharing data between proprietary systems. These days its pretty much a requirement that if you are going to develop data sets for use on the web, you will need at some point to convert these to XML. Flash MX 2004 provides its own built-in XML data handling capabilities which have been upgraded for speed in the MX version. This course will enable you to use Flash MX to interact with XML data sources and display the results in drop-down menus, listings and other layouts. Finally, you will bring together the learning from the course by building an XML-driven multiple choice quiz in Flash, with XML quiz data stored on a back-end database server.

Requirements
Good working knowledge of the Flash MX environment and workspace; ability to animate with the timeline and use symbols, buttons, text and movie clips within Flash; intermediate knowledge of Actionscript, or any other modern programming language. Working Knowledge of MS Access and Dreamweaver MX an advantage.


Course Outline

XML Overview
• What is XML?
• Why XML is important
• The Problem
• The Solution

Web Architecture
• Application Tiers
• Single Tier
• Client-Server
• Three Tier
• N-Tier

Writing and Viewing XML Documents
• Creating XML Documents in Dreamweaver
• Creating XML Documents in Notepad
• Creating XML Documents in Simpletext
• Viewing XML in Internet Explorer

Creating a Basic XML Page
• XML Tags
• XML Attributes
• Elements and Nesting
• PCDATA
• Well formed XML
• DTDs and Validation

XML Rules
• XML Naming
• XML Tags
• Case-sensitivity
• Using Quotes for Attributes
• The Escape Characters and CDATA
• The Root Element

XML Etiquette
• XML Declarations
• Which case should be used?
• Segmenting Data
• Attributes vs Elements
• White space

XML Examples
• Email
• News
• Guest Book
• Quiz

Traversing XML in Flash
• How Flash reads XML
• The XML Object
• XML nodes
• Parent-child relationships
• Attributes as name/value pairs
• White Space and the ignoreWhite property
• Mixed Nodes

Extracting XML Data in Flash
• Data from nodes
• Data from Attributes
• Traversing Nodes

XML Document Information
• Status Codes
• Status Code Handling

Building XML in Flash
• Creating Nodes and Attributes
• Removing Nodes and Attributes
• Copying Nodes
• Loading XML into Flash
• Sending XML from Flash to the Server