Read Full Documentation >> Data Binding Components in Flash MX 2004 Pro: browsing a catalog

Our goal is simple: to browse a two level catalog of products (cold cuts and spanish ham). Users can select one family of products and see the details of each item in the selected catalog. Our data source is a MySQL database and we will be using PHP to access the database and output xml data to the flash application. In total there are 5 families of products and 31 products, each product has it's own image.

To follow this article you will need to have a local Web Server running PHP and MySQL (which are freely available). If you do not have a local server running PHP, you can download an automatic package for installing it on your platform, or download Apache, MySQL, and PHP seperatly and manually install them. Auxiliary instructions for Mac users and Windows users are available in the Technical reference area of flash-db. And the most important: Flash MX 2004 Pro. Make sure to download/buy the Pro version since the standard version does not include the data components.

Here are the files you will need in order to follow this tutorial.

If you are an experienced actionscriptor and have some familiarity with dynamic data in Flash MX, then you may want to jump to the Quick Start Guide. Otherwise Read On >>.

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