Is FDS the only way?

[Syed_Mazhar_Has]

Hello every one, i am very new to this world of flex but i
have good concepts and working experience of AS. What i wanna know
is, do we have some other ways to connect to our server-side
languages like we have LoadVars in flash or we have to rely only on
FDS because most of my clients can't afford its hosting nor i can
do that effectively because i am not good in both JAVA and
coldfusion, rather i am a .Net developer. I know there is
HTTPService object but that only takes XML, what if if a want to
send some data in Non-Xml format like in query string or some other
way? please shed some lite on it in your expert opinions.



Thanks and regards!

Syed Mazhar Hasan

[aglosband]

You can pass data to your flex application using request
parameters. The data that you pass can then be retrieved from the
Application.application.parameters object.



If you pass in an request parameter called "id" to your
application like so




http://someserver.com/myapp.mxml?id=foo




You could have some code in your application that assigns the
value to a variable like this



var id:String = Application.application.parameters.id;



Hope that helps.

[seth_hodgson]

Hi Syed,



You're free to directly use LoadVars, URLLoader,
NetConnection, etc. in your Flex applications to interact with a
server. FDS functionality is built on top of these core Flash APIs
on the client, and they haven't gone away. So if you have simple
data access requirements and LoadVars works for you go ahead and
use it.



But take some time to read through the FDS docs to learn more
about the advanced functionality that it provides. When you get to
the point of managing sets of data that multiple clients may be
concurrently editing and viewing, it can really simplify and
empower your development.



Best,

Seth