Is there a way to bind my flex builder to my django application

Question

Hi!

I am trying to create simple flex application, which uses django as a back-end part. Have a question:

Usually when I run my application Flex Builder creates a file in a directory on my local PC and then opens a browser and points to it. Everything was fine, but when I decided to link django server to flex applications via xml data providers I started to get security errors. (Related to absence of crossdomain.xml). When I created the file and put it on the server:

   <?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- http://www.foo.com/crossdomain.xml -->
<cross-domain-policy>
    <allow-access-from domain="http://127.0.0.1:8000"/&gt;
    <allow-access-from domain="127.0.0.1"/>
</cross-domain-policy>

Then tried the application again, I got error in console of my FB Error: Request for resource at http://127.0.0.1:8000/go/active/ by requestor from file:///Users/oleg/Documents/FB3/usersList/bin-debug/usersList.swf is denied due to lack of policy file permissions.

I don't know how to fix the error. But also the question is there a way to configure FB3 to put my swf files to the server directly, so I will not need any crossdomain?

Thanks Oleg

Answer 1

I don't know a way to get FlexBuilder to automatically deploy your changed SWF; you could certainly look into an automation approach (like Maven and Flex-Mojos) to make that happen.

That said, getting rid of that error is usually just a matter of adding a policy file to the server.

Answer 2

The second error is caused because you're trying to fetch http resources from a "file" location. My recommendation is that you change your Flex Builder project so it outputs to a location within the Django web site, rather than to the flex-bin directory. This setting can be changed in the properties dialog of the project. Then, you should be able to have your front-end and back-end share the same protocol and domain.

Answer 3

We struggled with this a lot. The Flex security stuff didn't strike me as well built, but perhaps we just had different approaches in mind than Adobe's developers. The solution that worked for us was to serve both the SWF and the dynamic data from the same host and port.

On our development boxes, we tell Apache to serve the SWF from a directory in the workspace, and the dynamic data from a local copy of the app. When we push to production, SWF and app get pushed simultaneously to the same virtual host.

If that's inconvenient for you, the Apache ProxyPass directive can be used to make Apache front for other servers. I've not used that in production, but it's been very handy for developer setups.