Flex writing to it’s own directory

Question

I have a Flex application I’m writing (Learning exercise) that I’d like to run of a network drive for many users to access. I’d like users to be able to save high scores on the network.

Users have read write to the network location it's on.

I don’t want to change anything on the computers that might use it (IE install AIR) or IE/Firefox settings. They are just default.

I don’t want to run a server (IE PHP)

Is there anyway to do it?

Cheers

Answer 1

Nope, not without AIR. And even then with difficulty. Flex runs within the context of the browser, and only has available to it the resources available to the browser (for obvious security reasons.)

Flash enjoys a unique position of corporate trust for reliability and safety, and they do everything possible to protect that position. So you're sandboxed.

The best I can think of is put together something that serves a URL and a common or custom read-write protocol - probably not trivial.

Answer 2

You will have to use a backend to access any of those resources. Eg, if you're using BlazeDS then you can just use Java to write to the network. You will have a server anyways to host your application.

Answer 3

You really want to use a backend technology for this. If you're dead set against it, Flash Player 10 can write files to the local filesystem. You could probably trick it to use a network resource by referencing it as a mapped drive or maybe even a named host.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/flash/net/FileReference.html#save()

You can also use the "load()" method of FileReference to read a local file into your Flex application.

I really don't recommend you write in an application using this but it looks like it could be done. The caveat here is that these actions can happen only if the user specifically chooses a location for a file: they need to select the file you want to load or choose the location where a file is saved.