My problem: I have a program in Flex3 that accesses a server. The program itself is on a server and accessed through a web browser. The point is that I don't want to hardcode in the swf file the IP of the server to access, since it changes and for various other reasons...
How can I do that? Can I put a file in the same directory and what then?
To access a config file on the same server as the SWF, you should be able to use an HTTPService or URLLoader with a relative URL rather than absolute. You can get fancier (changing ports) by accessing the url field of your base Application and creating a new absolute URL from that.
If the SWF is hosted separately from the HTML, you can use BrowserManager url to build your config url instead.
See this article: Externalizing Service Configuration using BlazeDS and LCDS
It will also work for HTTPService with some minor modifications.
Related
Here's what I would like to accomplish:
I have a file stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage (or for that matter any file which is not on my web server but accessible via a URL).
I want to force download a file without actually downloading the file on my web server first i.e. browser should automatically fetch the file from this external URL and prompts the user to download it.
Possible Solutions Explored:
Here's what I have explored so far (and why they won't work):
Using something like FileContentResult as described here Returning a file to View/Download in ASP.NET MVC to download the file. This solution would require me to fetch the contents on my server and then stream from my server to the browser. For this reason this solution won't work.
Using HTML 5 download attribute: HTML 5 download attribute would have worked perfectly fine however the problem is that while it is really a very neat solution, it is not supported in all browsers.
Changing the file's content type: Another thing I could do (at least for the files that I own) to change the content type property of the file to something that the browser wouldn't understand and thus would be forced to download the file. This might work in some browsers however not in all as IE is smart enough to go beyond the content type and sees the file's content to determine the content type. Furthermore if I don't own the files, then I won't have access to changing the content type of the file.
Simply put, in my controller action I should be able to specify the URL of the file and somehow browser should force download the file.
Is this something which can be accomplished? If yes, then any ideas how I could accomplish this?
Simply put, in my controller action I should be able to specify the URL of the file and somehow browser should force download the file [without exposing the URL of the file to the client].
You can't. If the final URL is to remain hidden, your server must serve the data, so your server must download the file from the URL.
Your client can't download a file it can't get the URL to.
You can create file transfer WCF service (REST) which will stream your content from blob storage or from other sources through your file managers to client browser directly by URL.
https://{service}/FileTransfer/DownloadFile/{id, synonym, filename etc}
Blob path won't be exposed, web application will be free from file transfer issues.
I am working on a project that is primarily ASP.NET based. The main project is meant to be deployed to multiple locations for different clients, so one client might be located at website.com/client1 and another at website.com/client2. Within the application, we regularly use the application root operator ~ to get the path to a resource.
We also have a bunch of Flex applications that get deployed in there, and many rely on web services within the ASP.NET application. What I'm after is a way to reference the services relative to the application root. Here's an example of the location of some files for two client deployments:
Client A
website.com/clientA/swf/FlexApplication.swf
website.com/clientA/services/webService.asmx
Client B
website.com/clientB/swf/FlexApplication.swf
website.com/clientB/services/webService.asmx
FlexApplication and webService are both exactly the same, so what I want to do is something like this in the Flex code:
var myService:CustomService = new CustomService(~/services/webService.asmx);
myService.callMethod("Test");
I would like to avoid using relative paths for the usual reasons. Is there a good way to do this or a good way to pass the root url to the flex application from ASP.NET? Thanks in advance.
Its definitely a good idea to avoid relative URL's. The easiest way is to pass the information in via Flash Vars in the HTML embed statement.
Check out Adobe's documentation on using FlashVars with Flex: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=passingarguments_3.html
Summary:
Add a line to the HTML embed statement like this:
<param name='flashVars' value='serviceRoot=/myserviceRoot'/>
Then access it in Flex via the mx.core.Application.application.parameters accessor
import mx.core.Application;
var parameters:Object = Application.application.parameters;
var serviceRoot:String = parameters['serviceRoot'];
relative to the application root
Flex knows nothing about the application root of a ASP.NET application. The only thing that the Flex app knows is the URL that it is served from. It does not know the URL of the page. Keep in mind that the URL of the page and the URL of the SWF are not the same.
It appears, given your directory structure, that you can use the SWF's URL to get the information you're after.
In a Flex 3 Application, you can get use the url property of the Application tag:
(Application.application as Application).url
In a Flex 4 Spark application, you can also use the url property of the Application Tag, but you have to get it differently:
(FlexGlobals.topLevelApplication as Application).url
Then you can parse it with URLUtils to get your directory structure. Probably store that as a global variable in your Flex application somehow and use it to construct the URL for the service calls you are making to the remote server.
I use this handy little utility to get URL information via javascript inside the .swf.
http://www.flexpasta.com/index.php/category/utility-classes-that-help-you-deal-with-string-numbers-arrays-and-objects-in-actionscript/
I would like to know how to configure the flex crossdomain.xml in tipfy with the Google app engine skd.
Please advice. Thanks.
Edit:
Tipfy is a framework using in Gae.
I would like to know:
where I can place the crossdomain.xml, in the root or other place,
do I need script to redirect to the xml,
what files that I need to modify, eg. app.yaml.
any other things or file I need to modify or create to make it work.
Thanks.
Place the crossdomain.xml anywhere in your app (eg, the root of the app), then use a static file handler to configure it in app.yaml. You don't need to touch any framework code at all.
If you are using GAE the app url will be typically http://myapp.appspot.com and the Flash player will need a cross domain file from http://myapp.appspot.com/crossdomain.xml. In a Java environment it is as simple as creating this file in web folder of the project, that's it. It will be the same for Python, put this in your app's web root folder, not Google's web server root folder. This worked for me.
I've got an HTTP service I defined in Flash Builder, via the "Data Services" tab. I've got an absolute URL in there right now.
What I really want is to not define a path that includes a domain name at all--I want the service to simply call an absolute path that's on the same domain as whatever domain the SWF was served from... can I do that? When I got rid of the base URL and then gave an absolute URL path (e.g., /roster/deleteMember), Flex Builder complained that "File does not exist." Well, of course it doesn't exist, it isn't a file, it's a URL to a service call--there is no corresponding file on the filesystem.
Can anyone advise me how to do that? If I change the domain name, it wipes out all the parameter definitions for the methods, so I have to go back to each method and setup the parameters again. Rather a headache.
Now, I would have thought this would work. from the adobe documentation:
The configuration files sometimes contain special {server.name} and {server.port} tokens. These tokens are replaced with server name and port values based on the URL from which the SWF file is served when it is accessed through a web browser from a web server. Similarly, a special {context.root} token is replaced with the actual context root of a web application.
So, if you specify the endpoint as
http://{server.name}:{server.port}/{context.root}, then
automatically on runtime, the variables are set by the flashplayer depending on where you've been downloaded the application.
Sounds great... but it's not working for me. I can't even set those values in the Flash Builder Data Services tool. Here's a recording of what I'm getting.
http://screencast.com/t/MTk0NzNiYzY
I'm not sure it's possible from the DS window.
If you were doing it in code, you could use Application.application.url to get where the swf had been loaded from.
We have hosted some downloadable files on our different server due to bandwidth problem.
Now we want to download those files using an ASP script from our current server.
But how could we know the absolute path of that particular server using ASP script ?
regards
sk
Not 100% sure of what you're asking...
If the remote files are within a website on the remote server, you van reference them directly. If they are managed within your application, you may need to build some additional web service/httphandler or "asp" page that retrieves and serves the image (binary write, setting mime type etc)