Get parameter from an external text file

[padawan]

Hi folks!

I just bought MMF2 Developer and I started away with some basic tutorials from the Clickteam website. My main purpose for using MMF is developing small multimedia stuff for embedding on websites, so I also got the Flash Exporter.

Now I am doing some little experiments to get myself warm.

My question: I´ve got 1 avtive object, and I want to scale it to a certain height. The height I want to get from an external text file that is in the same directory as the swf file. Which object should I use for reading the external file and retreiving the height value?

Regards,
padawan

[LB]

The Get object can get any file from any place on the web.

[padawan]

Thanks, LB! I played a little with the Get object. How would be the basic way if I want to retrieve a value from an external file using the get object, and how can I assing it as the Height of an Active Object?

[LB]

Just get the text file, ans when the get request is complete, just set the height accordingly.

[padawan]

I thought I just give it a try :-) I set up a text file that contains nothing but the interger value 140, named it "data.txt" and uploaded it to www.mydomain.com.

I started a new project in MMF as build type SWF. Then I inserted an active object and the get object into one frame. I added the events

- Frame: On Start of Frame -> Get Object get URL "http://www.mydomain.com/data.txt"
- Get Object: On get ready -> x-scale Active Object to fixed value retrieved from Get Object.

I build a SWF file from it and also upload it to my webserver.

The result is no success. The Active Object just flashes up one time in unscaled state, then disappears and doesn´t show again.

Can you give me a hint what I did wrong?

[LB]

You need to divide the received number by the size of your active.

Remember that 1.0 is normal size, 0.5 is half, and 2.0 is double. Imagine what 140.0 is! Thus, dividing it by the size of the active results in the correct displayed size.

[padawan]

Thanks for your reply, LB, but it still doesn´t work right :-(

I need to debug... so I wrote the retreived content from the get to a string object which I also put into my one frame. This works the string object shows the numeric value I put into the textfile (I took the value "3" this time to save me additional arithmetics). But the scaling of the active object according to retreived value still doesn´t work. The active object is not visible at all after I try to set x-scale to Fixed( "Get object" ). What data type is the retreived value? Do I maybe have to convert it to an integer before?

Regards, padawan

[DavidN]

Ah... "Fixed" is something completely different! You should use much the same method as you did to get the data out of the Get object and into the String, but convert it to a value along the way:

Set X scale to Val(Received$("Get Object"))

I can't remember if the expression for whatever's been retrieved is Received$ or something else... still, you get the idea.

[padawan]

Yes!! That was the solution, indeed. I mistook the Expression Fixed() for an absolute scaling in this case. With Set X scale to Val(Received$("Get Object")) it works perfect. Thanks a lot for all your efforts! Now I can go on experimenting with this setup.

[EDIT]
Oh, folks, this is great! I´m just having a great time playing around with the Get Object :eek:
[/EDIT]

Regards, padawan

[Sparckman]

Here is another way to retrieve values from an external source or just plain text
http://community.clickteam.com/threads/87236-Display-text-from-external-source