interchange data with flex/flash

I'm using services and amfphp for similar purposes - a Flex app that allows users to collaborate on manipulating a complex set of data.

Some links I found useful:

http://electricpineapple.net/2009/03/10/api-keys-to-the-city-setting-up-... - the best tutorial I found on connecting to Drupal from Flex. I noted a couple of gotchas in a comment on this post (almost at the bottom).
http://groups.drupal.org/node/2768 - a simpler example, but without authentication, so was less useful to me.
http://drupal.org/node/187998 - another example, with a pointer to how to expose additional drupal functionality to Flex.

http://www.dpdk.nl/opensource/drupalproxy-as-a-bridge-between-flash-as3-... - this is an open source package that takes care of all aspects of connecting from Flex to Drupal. I'm not using it as I developed my own code prior to seeing it, but it's a second generation of this package and seems worthwhile checking if you're starting from scratch.

http://raghuonflex.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/endpointatruntime/#comment-5324 - Not being very familiar with Flex, I had a problem of how to specify the drupal server at run time (to use different servers for development and production, for example). This post got me in the right direction.

http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/ - for handling URL based navigation within Flex, if you need it.

Other tips:

• Part of the difficulty is to understand the data representation for info you get from Drupal and how to structure what you send back to Drupal. You would expect the formats to be the same, but that is not the case (for example, between node.get and node.save). See this comment and the post it's in: http://drupal.org/node/275045#comment-1945326. It's easy to see what you get from Drupal services - you just set a break-point in Flex and inspect the data. It's a little trickier to send data back in the right format.

• As mentioned in the above comment, taxonomy is one such example. Here's the comment for the Flex function I wrote to massage taxonomy from what node.get provides to what Drupal expects on a node.save:

  /***
   * transform 'taxonomy' into what Drupal expects on node save.
   * Typically, a req's 'taxonomy' is an array of TaxonomyTerm's indexed by tid (this is what Drupal returns).
   * However, the node.save method expects a two-layer array (array of arrays), where the first array is
   * indexed by vid, and for each vid there is an array of that vocabulary's terms (indexed by tid). 
   * An exception is those taxonomies which are free-tagging ('tags'). These are all contained as the 
   * value of the master array item with a key of 'tags' (i.e., one more level of nesting). This value is 
   * an array indexed by vid's with each vid having as a value a string containing a list of comma-separated
   * tag names.
   * Note that all vocabularies must be included in this array, even those that don't have any terms 
   * associated with this node, so as to remove the last term in a vocabulary if needed (indicate an empty
   * vocabulary).    
   ***/
  

  (I'd post the function itself but it's a bit specific to my data structures and how I use Drupal). See also http://drupal.org/node/507650.

• Also, some node fields do not get returned with views.get (see more at http://drupal.org/node/678202). If you're comfortable with Drupal and run into such problems, it might be easier to bypass views and use a customer service you develop yourself (I've done a few, it's not too difficult).

Hope this helps get you on the right track. If you run into problems - this is a helpful forum to post questions to.

Micah

Hi Monti,

what you want to do is certainly very possible. We use the combination of drupal and flash/flex all the time for complex applications with drupal acting as the cms of choice for the flash frontend.

The book by travis tidwell is good and the DrupalProxy class that is linked in two of the above posts removed some of the shortcomings from the code in that book (most notable the lack of unlimited arguments when calling services and code bloat). It also features a very strong and consistent api so it should make you life easy.

the 17th of november I will be speaking at the adobe usergroup XL event in the netherlands about integrating flash and drupal. The session's video will be put up on the net after the event.

good luck

Zend AMF (http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.amf.server.html) is another option, i've been using it for a while now -- AMFPHP seemed abandoned at the time. In fact, i showed up here while looking into ways to better integrate it in Drupal, i might have more to contribute down the line.

Good luck,
Jeff Gauthier

Hi Jef,

I just talked to some of our developers, they are at the drupal dev days as we speak, in Brussels, participating in a code sprint and working on the zendamf implementation. So there will be some development on this done there. They are having a look at your work, things are in motion!