Specifications

220 Chapter 13 Dynamic Images
Example SWF: A News Reader To develop custom solutions, you need to be familiar with Flash Professional
and its ActionScript programming language, which is used to create live data.
The example below shows a complete news reader for displaying the latest
news from CNN:
var rssXML:XML; // RSS feed data is loaded here
var rssLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
var rssURL:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://rss.cnn.com/rss/edition_world.rss");
var timer : Timer = new Timer(10000); // For updating the display on a regular basis
rssLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, rssLoaded);
rssLoader.load(rssURL);
function rssLoaded(evt:Event):void {
var firstCall : Boolean = !rssXML;
rssXML = XML(rssLoader.data);
if (firstCall) {
updateDisplay(null); // Draw first time rigt away
timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, updateDisplay);
timer.start(); // Display other news every 10 seconds
}
}
function updateDisplay(evt : TimerEvent) : void {
var itemCount : uint = rssXML.channel.item.length();
if (itemCount) { // Has something to display
var pick : uint = Math.random() * (itemCount-1);
displayField.htmlText = rssXML.channel.item[pick].description;
}
}