Displaying Multiple Access Records with Flash and ASP

Most Flash & ASP tutorials only deal with returning one row of information at a time from the database to the Flash movie. I was interested in displaying multiple records and fields simultaneously. One resource (FlashCFM.com) pointed the way and I used this start to arrive at a nice solution which is explained here.

I wrestled for quite sometime on how to integrate Flash with Active Server Pages and owe a lot to some excellent tutorials available on the web :
www.15seconds.com/issue/010605.htm and www.asp101.com/articles/flash/

However, most of these tutorials only dealt with returning one row of information at a time. I was interested in displaying multiple records and fields simultaneously. One resource pointed the way and I used this start to arrive at the following solution.

Database
Download Access table here

ASP Page
To get this to work, you must format your ASP to output results in a way Flash can interpret them. Flash reads variables in URL encoded format - i.e.:

 &name    = Bob

Flash sees this as the variable "name" having the value of "Bob". Sounds great, but how do I do that? Here is the code:

<% Dim Serv, Conn, RecordView, Ename, output, collect, SQL Set RecordView = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset") SQL="SELECT * FROM EmailTable" Recordview.open SQL, "DSN=email" Do While Not RecordView.EOF Ename=RecordView("Name") Email=RecordView("Email") collect =collect & Ename&"," collects =collects & Email&"," RecordView.MoveNext Loop output="&output="& collect Response.Write output Response.Write "end&" eoutput="eoutput="& collects Response.Write eoutput Response.Write "end&" Counter = 1 Response.Write "Counter=" & Counter Response.Write "&" RecordView.Close Set RecordView = Nothing Set Conn = Nothing %>

ASP explained
The code is fairly straightforward :

1. Connect to your Access table and loop through each record
2. As you loop set up a variable - here I use " collect " - and concatenate each new value to this variable as you loop through the data table. Also, after you add each new value to the value of "collect " add the "&," character. This will tell flash that a new value pair is coming as well as format the results so that Flash can handle them as an array.
3. Response.write out the contents of the collect variable assigning these values to the variable "output"
4. The process is the same for each table field you wish to return to Flash as you can see from my example with the variable "eoutput"
5. Set up a variable named Counter and give it the value of 1. We will use this later to signal Flash that our results are ready to be displayed.

The output from this ASP page looks like this :

&output=Bill Sanders,Mark Winstanley,Betty Boop,Chief Crazy Horse,JoJo Yes,Junior Whiz,Wild Bill,Calamity Jones,Louie Louie,New Kid,Delia Q. Sanders,Charley Clapp, George Galore,Harry Potts,Vern Lawrence,Holy Cow,end &eoutput=bill@sandlight.com,mark@smoggywood.com,poopoopeedo@easy.net, drums@feather.com,jeepers@castle.gov,buzz@wordnow.org

Now - we are ready to put these variables into Flash!
Next: The Flash side of things