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This is page two of the tutorial on learning how to use Flash with PHP and mySQL. If you stumbled upon this page without reading page one, click here to visit page one of this tutorial.

Setting up your MySQL Table
Ok so our script doesn't do much right now. All it does is pass our SWF a simple variable whose value is hard coded in the script. This is a tutorial on getting data dynamically from a database so, let's move on to first setting up a table that will contain our information.
 
First of all, we must think about how our database will be organized. Text files are easy because they have a name and content, but how do we go about emulating that with a database? Simple. Take a look at the table below and you'll understand what I mean.

MySQL table named files: *------------------------------------------------* | filename | content | *------------------------------------------------* | myfile | my file contents are here | | anotherfile | some stuff here | *------------------------------------------------*

where filename is a varchar and content is a blob. This is the nice part. See how this is like a regular file system? It makes life simple as you can now execute queries like:

SELECT content FROM file WHERE filename='myfile';

Nice eh? Ok but I'm getting ahead of myself here. Before we move on to some more PHP, insert some dummy values in your database. So for example:

INSERT INTO files VALUES ( "testfile", "test content. man i hope this works!" );

Once you have successfully entered some data, it's time to move on to the last step.

Bringing Everything Together
Disregard the earlier PHP script we wrote and start off a fresh notepad session. The new script we will be writing will ultimately do three things.

You should note that the nature of the script assumes that the variable name of the dynamic text field is named content. Now, this can be a problem if you have several text fields in a single movie clip (i.e. you would have to name each field the same name, and that wouldn't do you much good). The problem can be resolved though by adding a new variable to our script and by sending a second value via our URL. I'm not going to go through how this because:

1. It's fairly simple to do and
2. I have methods to my madness .

Now back to Flash. Open the FLA we created earlier (the one with the lone movie clip with a dynamic text field in it), and modify the code attached to the movie clip so that it looks like this:

onClipEvent (load) { loadVariables("http://localhost/read.php?file=testfile", this, "GET"); }