Flash and SharePoint

Question

I have a flash control that I want to integrate with in SharePoint and would like to know what is the best way to read from a list so that I can display items in the flash control?

Code examples/ideas are welcome.

Answer 1

Theres a C# example in the source code that follows the SDK on how to code a custom field control -i know since i kept pestering MS for an example on this back in 2006 until they coded it to shut me up ;-)

Answer 2

I think the easiest way to retrieve items from a list in a Flash control will be through SharePoint's Lists Web Service. Specifically the GetListItems method can be used to retrieve a list item (or certain fields in a list item) based on a CAML query

Answer 3

"codeproject" Can be a good place if you want code. I have not used any of its code, therefor, I have no idea whether is stable or not.

Answer 4

Well, I can tell you how NOT to do it, unless you have to, which I did. Our client wanted a dynamic Flash piece, but our their IT wouldn't give us anything but basic author access.

Using the RSS feed output of a list, I was able to get the custom fields of the list into Flash as XML. The catch is that SharePoint puts any non-standard RSS fields (which were almost all of them in my case) into the RSS tag. So, you need to do some parsing of the content to get it work. Pretty ugly, but worked in the end.

Answer 5

I have written a custom ASPX page that emits list data as XML. The flash developer calls this ASPX and consumes the xml to populate his flash control with. I'm clueless with Flash but apparently it can manipulate XML.

The code is very simple:

• open list (the listname is passed in the querystring to the aspx)
• select the listitems you need (if not all)
• convert to xml ( I use )
• make sure to set the responsetype of the page to XML