Embeding your own external swf files

In this one, I'm going to help you guys out in adding fully working external swf files. You either made a swf file, or bought one from FD and you wanna embed it into this template, but it doesn't work. So what's the deal with that? Let's solve this problem out once and forever! ;)

What's the deal?!

Alright! Let's take it step by step. What we want to do is load an external swf inside our "index.swf" file. Let's say that our external swf is placed inside the "swf" directory. Once we load it into our template, because our index.swf file is a root file, everything that we load inside it will act like a root file.

Let's make it clear!

Ok! Let's load my mp3 player inside this template! In order to do that, I copied my mp3 player directory inside the swf directory and name it "MP3". Let's have a look!


Step 1

Let's open our MP3 directory and make things clear. Our index.swf file is searching for an xml file called data.xml. Because they are into the same directory (MP3), our path to the xml is "data.xml". If we open our player's index.fla file and have a look at line 68 inside the AS code, we'll see this:

qPlayer_xml.load("data.xml");




Step 2

Now! Let's add a button that will load our MP3 player inside our template! Let's go to the root directory and open our items.xml file! (using a text editor) Now let's move to the bottom of this file and add a new node just like the contact one but with our Mp3 player:


Save your xml file!
You can easily see that we have given the path to our mp3 index.swf correctly. But, there's a but and we will see what's all about at Step 3. :)

Step 3

Alright! If you remember from Step 1, because our mp3 index.swf and data.xml were inside the same directory, the path to data.xml was simple "data.xml". Now that we loaded the "swf/MP3/index.swf" file inside our template, our mp3's index.swf will act like it is placed inside the root directory, among with items.xml, backgrounds.xml, the swf directory and so on. :) That means that it will not find it's "data.xml" and WHY? because our mp3's data.xml it is placed inside "swf/MP3/data.xml". So what do we need to change? It's SIMPLE! The path to the xml!
So let's go to our swf/MP3 directory and open our index.fla file! Now let's open the AS code and let's modify line 68 to this:

qPlayer_xml.load("swf/MP3/data.xml");


Re-export your mp3's index.swf file and save changes. Now the mp3 player won't work individually because we changed it's xml path. But it will work from within our template!


Last step

Have you opened our data.xml file? If not, let's open it and see what's all about there!


As you can see, we have a path to each mp3 file that it will be played. But, once we load our xml inside the template, and it will act like a root file, will these paths still be correct? NO! That's why we need to change them to:

track source="swf/MP3/mp3s/1.mp3" ...
track source="swf/MP3/mp3s/2.mp3" ...
and so on...


SAVE XML CHANGES!
Your data.xml should look like this:


That's all guys!

So, the main idea is to pay attention to the paths and to the behaviour of the loaded files. ;) Be slick!