Flash Form Applications

[amehdi webforumsuser@macromedia.com]

Hi All,

I need some serious advice on what is the best way to build applications in Flash Professional using Forms.

We are working on a major application for our intranet users. The application requires at least 14 forms, data from 3 different systems. The demo has approved but the problem is that the movie takes around 1 minute to load. I have tried 2 different approaches and want to find out the best one.

Approach # 1
Created different swf's for different forms in the main movie that is a place holder for all those swf's. For example, The main movie has 10 empty forms and 10 corresponding swf's get loaded into them. I have function calls from all those swf's to the main movie, which let the movie know what swf has loaded and then it loads the next one. Same thing is with data. After all the forms get populated with those external corresponding swf's, I load default data for the entire application using two webServiceConnectors for two different web services. I use the same technique to run those webServiceConnectors parallel to each other and they keep calling the next operation in line to load default data. Once all the data is loaded, the process populates all the components with the data downloaded.
This approach makes the movie to load very slow. approx. 1 min.

Approach # 2
Instead of using form based application, I use document based application, which has no screens and I use timeline. With this approach, I create all the forms as movieclips and put them on keyframes on the timeline and when users navigate through the app, the timeline jumps to the requested keyframe. This way the app loads quickly and almost immediately but there's a slight delay in navigation when it jumps from keyframe to keyframe for different forms. Also, for this case, I have to keep track of users inputs to repopulate the form when they get back to that form.

Please advise what is the best practice to develop an application like this. Any help will be highly appreciated.

Thanks

[amehdi webforumsuser@macromedia.com]

Hi All,

I need some serious advice on what is the best way to build applications in Flash Professional using Forms.

We are working on a major application for our intranet users. The application requires at least 14 forms, data from 3 different systems. The demo has approved but the problem is that the movie takes around 1 minute to load. I have tried 2 different approaches and want to find out the best one.

Approach # 1
Created different swf's for different forms in the main movie that is a place holder for all those swf's. For example, The main movie has 10 empty forms and 10 corresponding swf's get loaded into them. I have function calls from all those swf's to the main movie, which let the movie know what swf has loaded and then it loads the next one. Same thing is with data. After all the forms get populated with those external corresponding swf's, I load default data for the entire application using two webServiceConnectors for two different web services. I use the same technique to run those webServiceConnectors parallel to each other and they keep calling the next operation in line to load default data. Once all the data is loaded, the process populates all the components with the data downloaded.
This approach makes the movie to load very slow. approx. 1 min.

Approach # 2
Instead of using form based application, I use document based application, which has no screens and I use timeline. With this approach, I create all the forms as movieclips and put them on keyframes on the timeline and when users navigate through the app, the timeline jumps to the requested keyframe. This way the app loads quickly and almost immediately but there's a slight delay in navigation when it jumps from keyframe to keyframe for different forms. Also, for this case, I have to keep track of users inputs to repopulate the form when they get back to that form.

Please advise what is the best practice to develop an application like this. Any help will be highly appreciated.

Thanks