Comments on: Embed Almost Anything in Your SWF

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:36:22 +0000

Great post! The Adobe live docs list the acceptable mime-types used for transcoding, and text/xml is not among them. I’ve been using this technique (with octet-stream) for a while to compress xml documents for lighter deployment (I’m sure you’ve noticed that the xml file size shrinks by about 75% when using the embed technique. ) If XML is included as a literal in the code, rather than being embedded with the [Embed] directive, you get close to 90% compression (120kb xml files drop to circa 12kb as swfs!). I’m thinking about developing an app that dynamically builds an actionscript file from a source xml doc, that can then be compiled with ant… to semi-automate the process for clients with lots of xml docs. Definitely an under-documented, but cool, affordance!

By: Daniel Wabyick

Daniel Wabyick — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:21:11 +0000

I noticed that any XML with a doctype declaration screws up the encoder with text/XML. Like the following …

Removing that works, or else, Application/Octet-stream seems to work really well.

By: Murray

Murray — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:35:34 +0000

In my experience, specifying text/xml doesn’t make a difference. Flash will create an object class, with data and prototype. The xml you want is in the data fork. So your first bit of code would be:

[Embed(source = "test.xml")]
var EmbeddedXML:Class;
var myXML:Object = EmbeddedXML.data;
// process your xml – the data object behaves as xml allowing the same methods
var myvar:String = myXML.noderef.toString(); // replace noderef with target node

It’s buggy with reading in XML, the first line has to be a node – not a comment or a doctype declaration.

By: Roger Braunstein

Roger Braunstein — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:06:57 +0000

Hey everyone,

Yes, I’ve had problems getting this to work with text/xml continuously as well. I swear, though, it did work once. Then I wrote this. Then it promptly broke. I assert that with noodling you can get it to work with text/xml (I swear it did!) but I’ve been using application/octet-stream ever since. Sorry for the misinformation!

By: Trevor

Trevor — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:05:12 +0000

yeah u gotta use:
mimeType=”application/octet-stream”)]

not text/xml

…. :/

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:11:42 +0000

Actually, this works just fine here (Flex Builder 3)

[Embed(source="/../xml/TacticalMaps.xml",mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
protected const EmbeddedXML:Class;

public function LoadMapXML():void
{
var x:XML = XML(new EmbeddedXML());
trace(x.toXMLString());

for each (var map:XML in x.maps)
{
var tmd:TacticalMapData = new TacticalMapData(map);

maps[map.@name] = tmd;
}

By: rudestar

rudestar — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:18:45 +0000

PS. Thanks Dan. http://www.dan-hunter.net

By: rudestar

rudestar — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:17:05 +0000

looks like a bug in the transcoder perhaps or the relevant transcoder is unavailable for an Actionscript project this seems to work:

package { import flash.display.MovieClip; import flash.utils.ByteArray;


	public class Test extends MovieClip

	{

		[Embed(source="data.xml", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]

	    private static const MyData:Class;

public function Test():void{ var byteArray:ByteArray = new MyData() as ByteArray; var xml:XML = new XML(byteArray.readUTFBytes(byteArray.length)); trace(xml.toXMLString()); } } }

By: rudestar

rudestar — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:11:05 +0000

yeah I have to concurr this example does not seem to work or at least not in FB2.01 as an Actionscript project. Real shame as I am going nuts trying to embed XML too sensitive to load remotely. Do we have to set compiler properties or compile outside of flex builder using mxmlc to get this to work? Or will the XML parser only work within a Flex project?

By: Y

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:01:48 +0000

Hi Roger,

I am trying to embed an SWF created in Flash (CS3). After embedding it I want to access a parameter from it (a:String).

I am not able to do it.

[Embed(source="3.swf")]
private const SWFAsset:Class;

and using it as

var swfMovie:MovieClip = new SWFAsset() as MovieClip;

now I want to access a variable “a” from the movie clip.

tried trace(”Val ” + swfMovie['a'].toString());

Any ideas??

By: Roger Braunstein

Roger Braunstein — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 15:50:30 +0000

@Eli, I'm not sure you will have success playing back embedded FLVs, since the NetStream object seems to only want to load FLVs from remote locations... The one way I thought might work, though not exactly what you want, is to compress the videos as SWFs instead of FLVs, and then embed them and display with Loader.loadBytes().

By: Eli

Eli — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 13:26:30 +0000

Hey Roger :)
That is cool example u have here.
Is there a chance it will work with *.flv ?
Actually I managed to embed it as byte array, but i could not figure how to translate it backwards.
The problem I’m dealing with is that my client wants to put the player I made on a CD and he wants the videos to be part of the swf.
Another way could be embedding the whole folder into swf.
Is there a chance someone ever had to do it ?
Thanks a lot.
Fell free to contact me on my skype, the address is : atlaseli

By: Jun Heider

Jun Heider — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:56:21 +0000

Hello Roger,

I’m having issues using your xml embed technique. I have a feeling it may be my prolog.

Would you be open to providing us with test.xml that you used in the example above so that we can test with an XML file that works?

Thanks!

By: Ruben Swieringa

Ruben Swieringa — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:28:25 +0000

Hey Roger, are you sure the XML-example works for you? I tried it out in Flex Builder (2) and all I got was the toString() representation (”[object Model_EmbeddedXML]“)..

By: Matthias

Matthias — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:10:01 +0000

Hello,
I have the same problems mentioned in the other comments. I get also the error xmltagstartend unexpected. So how does it really work to embed XML?
Please help!