Getting data into flex charts from csv

Question

I am developing a flex charting web application which gets data from csv files. This application is supposed to be installed on the website of a client. The client uses a web server management system where the URLs generated are pretty long and contain non-alphanumeric characters. An example is given below:

http://www.example.com/EXTERNAL/ORGANIZATION/0,,contentMDK:20135608~pagePK:64060242~piPK:64060289~theSitePK:299948,00.html

The problem is that on my test server, the application is running just fine. But when deployed on the client's site, the application and the charts load, but the CSV data fails to load. The error given is:

Input output error: IO_ERROR

I have tried both relative referencing (relative with respect to the swf file) and absolute reference to the URL of the csv file. But both approaches have failed.

Any ideas?

I would ideally like to stay away from absolute URLs since that would break down if the charts need to move to another location.

Thanks
Vinayak

Answer 1

I don't know how much it helps, but there is an as3 CSVLib available.

About the IOError, can you please paste the text ? If you listen for the IOErrorEvent and trace event.text in the handler, you should something similar to this:

Error #2035: URL Not Found. URL: yourFile.csv

HTH, George

Answer 2

Umm, I don't know what to say really. Not knowing much about the server I'll have to resort to a list of things I can think of. Some of these are admittedly just a stab in the dark. In general it appears that this is a server side issue and as a front end developer you can't be expected to solve this. I know that getting the application to work is the priority here, but if you don't have access to the server there not much you can do to this issue.

First let's eliminate the completely obvious. Is the file ending definitely supposed to be .html and not .csv?

My original thought was that the CMS is somehow blocking Flash from loading the content, but would allow a browser to access it. Since it won't allow that either there are three options that come to mind:

1) The server or the browser does something to the URL when you make the request. Try installing the LiveHTTPHeaders (link) add on for Firefox, that'll allow you to look at the raw HTTP requests and responses. There might be some server side redirects that affect the request. The HTTP Headers should help you with that too.

2) The .csv files are kept in a folder that the web server doesn't have read access to.

3) maybe you need to use HTTPS instead of HTTP. This would be a bit strange since you are getting the URL from the server in the first place. The clients server admin should be able to sort this out for you.

4) I'm not sure what would happen if the script that handles your request is Python. In Python the colons are directory separators, so that might throw the whole thing off.

5) The clients management system does something strange to the URL before it's handed to you. Although I'm not sure how you would test this.

That's it I think. I'm out of ideas for now. For the testing I would forget the flex application and just try the requests from the browser address bar first. Since the application is working on your test server the issue shouldn't be your code. When you get the requests to work on the browser, if they still don't work from Flex then it's your code.