Forcing SWF to load file in local driver of server before sending over browser - html

I am building a flash application which requires loading of an xml file using URLLoader. While developing application in my local machine with flash professional I can easily load it by
private var myLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader(new URLRequest("./com/assets/config.xml"));
When I publish the application and click on the html generated and the app loads on browser perfectly.
If I make a server (localhost:1111) that delivers the html file over browser on connect, the html file doesn't load the application (.swf).
While trying to debug it, I found that if I change the myLoader variable as below, the html file loads the swf properly.
private var myLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader(new URLRequest("http://localhost:1111/com/assets/config.xml"));
I believe the SWF is making another GET request after the html loads on my browser, that is the reason the SWF doesn't work without the change.
Is there any way I can load the xml file in SWF before it gets delivered over browser. This is to avoid another call to the server. I appreciate any help in clarifying my understanding and suggestion for workaround.


If you want to upload your SWF and have users access the configuration XML, you will need to host the XML somewhere reachable by your users. Your local machine (localhost:1111) is not reachable by anyone other than yourself (outside of some unusual hosts tweaking on the user's machine).
When you set up hosting and a web-server to actually serve the file over HTTP, you will need to do a few things:
Set up a crossdomain file on the server to define which hosts are allowed to load your configuration XML.
Amend your application to load data from the server, e.g. new URLRequest('http://your_domain_or_ip/config.xml').
The reason you cannot retain your reference to the XML file as a relative ./com/assets/config.xml is because the SWF will only load files over the local filesystem if it is being viewed as a file in the filesystem vs inside a browser.
When the SWF runs, the URLLoader instance you create will perform a HTTP GET to load your XML file.
If you want to avoid performing additional GET requests to fetch the XML, you will have to compile the configuration into the SWF itself using the [Embed] meta tag.

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Load and Save JSON file react client-side only

I am building a simple editor-type application in react-redux, and I want to mimic the operation of downloading and uploading json files for saving and loading data - entirely client side. The server side does not need the data. Local storage may be too small, and it would be nice to provide the user the data in a portable file they could upload on a new machine. Is this even possible, and if so how?

Using a blob file.
You can set the content of a new file which is temp and local, then trigger a click event to download the file.
duplicate answer here and here

Possible to load non-public file from same web server?

I'm working on a web-based Flash application for a client which loads an external file from the same directory it is located in on the server. I use a URLRequest to load the file:
loader.load(new URLRequest("Config.xml));
Right now the Config.xml file uses chmod 644, which gives it public read access. However, the client would like to protect the configuration file so that it can't be downloaded by third-parties.
I'm thinking that it won't be possible to hide the file by removing public read permission (chmod 640) because then the Flash document, which is executed client-side, will be unable to read it. My tests seem to confirm this. Is there any way for a Flash app on the web to read a file from the server without exposing it to the public?

As others have already said, you can't do this. For the SWF to be able to load the file from the client-side it must be public.
A possible solution that might be good enough for your client is to embed the XML file contents in your HTML on the server side, for example as FlashVars or JavaScript output, then the SWF does not need to load the XML file directly and you don't need to make the file public.
For example:
Server-side PHP:
<?php
$xml = file_get_contents("Config.XML");
$encodedXml = rawurlencode($xml);
?>
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="my-flash.swf" width="550" height="400">
<param name="movie" value="my-flash.swf" />
<param name="FlashVars" value="config=<? echo $encodedXml ?>"/>
</object>
Client-side AS3:
var xml:XML = XML(stage.loaderInfo.parameters.config);
Of course someone could look at your HTML source and decode the XML themself, but any way you get the XML content into your SWF will expose that possibility, to varying levels of difficulty. You could make the encoding more obfuscated (url encoding is easy to spot) or encrypted to make it harder to find.

No. Flash is using a regular HTTP request to load the config file, so of course it can't get the file if it's not publicly-accessible.
What you could do is require authentication for the config file and include credentials in your URLRequest declaration. However, this still suffers from the weakness of someone sniffing the traffic to discover the authentication, and then running that request again with another tool.
Ultimately, you can't have it both ways: Either your config is accessible and insecure, or it's secure but unusable.

The short answer :
No, you can not do that.
The long answer :
No, you can not do that because, as you already know, Flash Player is a client-side technology, so it's exactly the same as a browser, and any file loaded by your SWF is accessible and visible for absolutely any person who has access to that SWF file, also forget about files access permissions which didn't has any effect in this situation.
Note here that you can use some encryption system to encrypt the content of that file and your SWF will decrypt it, but the problem here, is that you have also to encrypt your SWF file which, to my knowledge, is not a very reliable technique because SWF decompilers are really very efficient nowadays ...
...
Hope that can help.

A client side app (Flash or other) cannot read or load by itself any files from a server even from the server it's coming from. When it loads a public xml file, it makes a request for it and if the file has the right permission and the server knows how to serve that file, the request is granted and the file is served. This is very much so a server side operation so you can know see that when you say: "Flash runs client-side, so how would I take any advantage of a server-side solution?" this is a clear misunderstanding of how things work on client side and server side because if you do load a xml file then you do take advantage of a server side solution. Now this being said, how to do it when the file permission if turned of.
It is common to not allow access to files or directories on a server, in that case a client side cannot be granted access to those directly. So this is when you need to use a serve side technology to serve those files. Serve side technology like for example PHP can access all files on the server and make copy of them or change temporarily their permission etc ...
You can serve to your client side those forbidden files by simply writing a serve side script that would serve the file to you depending on some criteria you define (or none). The server side can change the permission allowing you to download it and then change it back, or it can copy the file and put it in a public accessible place and then delete it. You can also change the extension of your xml (to .whatever for example) and not provide a mimetype for it, even though the file is public the server won't be able to serve it, you can then make you serve side script change its extension for you on a per need basis. There's just hundreds of ways to do it including web services and even AMF and all that while the needed file is not publicly accessible. But yes you have to write server side scripts which is a VERY COMMON way to serve files to client side.

Load local video using html source path attribute from remote html in UIWebView

I'm creating an app where a remote html loads into UIWebView and needs to access a locally stored mp4 video file.
I've tried subclassing NSURLCache class which allowed me to substitute remote images for local ones stored in the documents directory but can't seem to do the same for videos. Makes sense since videos typically don't get cached.
Does anyone know of any trick that I can use?

How to load all files in a folder with as3

I need to load a large number of pictures (around 30) in a sequence as a short movie, each .png has the size 960X540.
I don't want the loader depend on the name of each picture as I will make changes frequently.
Is there any suggestions?

Are you trying to load images from a local file system, or a remote web server?
If you want to load images from a local file system folder, you can use AIR's File/getDirectoryListing().
If you want to load images from a remote server, and you do not want to rely on a pre-defined file naming pattern, the server will need to be able to provide directory information, for example a PHP script that reads the directory contents and outputs XML or JSON. There's no general way for a client to probe a web server for files in a directory. Some web servers do have a default web directory listing script that shows when there is no "default" file in a folder (index.html, etc), but that probably won't be quite good enough for what you're trying to do.
As a final note, if you don't mind manually updating a file on the server that lists all the files as XML or JSON, you could create a simple AIR app to process a local file directory and generate the necessary XML or JSON and upload that to your server.

Is there a way to force a browser to not use a .swf file from cache? From within the .swf file itself?

So I have a .SWF file, there are several people I know calling the .SWF file directly from my server onto their page.
I need to do some maintenance on the .SWF and wanted to replace the current SWF file with one that just says "under maintenance". I know there are ways to do it via html/php but I do not have access to the html/php code the other people are using on their servers to call my .swf file.
I plan to name the .swf file with the same exact name, so it doesn't break for the other people linking to my .swf file from their website.. but my concern is that their users will show the a cached version of the .swf file instead of my new .swf file.
Is there actionscript or anything I can put in the .swf so that it prevents the users on the other site from using a cached version?
Thank you.

If people are loading the SWF file directly, the only thing you can do is replace it by a polite loader.
This new structure would be:
a new SWF with the same new from the previous and rename the original one.
this new "main" file would load the original one appending new Date().getTime() to the end of the file name.
loader.load(new URLRequest('myOriginal.swf?k='+new Date().getTime()));
That should work.

You can reduce the caching period for .swf files via an .htaccess rule. For your purposes, reduce it to 1 hour or less. That will force all the newly requested swf files to be redownloaded.
When you're finished with maintenance, remove the rule or increase the caching period.