Flash Dynamic text v Static Text w/ XML

[ameikle]

I'm new to flash so this may be a very easy answer to this question.

I'm loading xml data into my flash movie and the data loads fine but it's not visible when I do a test.

I know the xml data is loading because if I select the area where the text should be and copy and paste it to to note pad the data then becomes visible.

However if I create a static text and enter some garbage data I can see the garbage text.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, I have tried changing the color thinking it may be the text color clashing with the background color being the reason I cannot see the text but that has not worked either. Any suggestions would be greatly helpful.

--Thanks

[Egg Bramhill]

ameikle
Sorry, I missed this post. Are you still having problems with this?
Egg

[pknair]

Just as a heads-up, ActionScript 3.0 will be coming out relatively soon. For those of you who aren't aware, XML becomes INSANELY easy to handle with AS3.0 - much like handlers available in pretty much every other language out there. They gave some demos of handling at Flash in the Can 2006 and it looks like it's finally going to be at the point where it makes sense to use XML in Flash. Yay!

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Deep

Great to hear from you again. I'm not really into xml but would appreciate any links for "thicko's".

[pknair]

Hi Egg,

Yeah, I've been away for a while...work is definitely piling up! But as for XML, from what aspects are you looking for info? Do you mean XML within Flash? Or XML in general? If it's XML in Flash, Actionscript.org has a decent tutorial:

http://www.actionscript.org/tutorial...ML/index.shtml

but as you can see, it's ugly trying to use XML in Flash as of AS 2.0. When AS 3.0 comes into Flash 9, it's going to allow us to reference items within the XML document by their tagname! That will make things WAY easier. Right now you have to look at XML as a tree, and parse the tree to get any information that you want. While that's great if your data is structured as a tree, it's EXTREMELY rare that you would use XML to represent tree structures. And if I'm losing you by talking about tree structures, don't worry - it's not really all that important. Suffice it to say the way Flash parses XML right now is terrible. It's honestly easier to use something like PHP to parse the XML document, then pass the information to Flash in something that you can read in a LoadVars type object. It's a shame to say this but, unfortunately, it's true.

If you're looking for info on XML in general, and you don't mind reading technical docs, there's nothing better than the w3c's specs on XML. (http://www.w3.org/XML/) It's techy, but it's got all the details you need. If you want something more student-friendly, try http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_whatis.asp - that's not a bad primer.

It's a shame that AS1.X and AS2.X have been so bad at parsing XML. It closes off a powerful way of representing data to Flash developers.

[pknair]

Incidentally, for ameikle, did you ever figure out the colour issue? If not, please feel free to post the file and we can certainly have a look at what's going on.