Programming Flash Communication Server

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

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Chapter 4: Applications, Instances, and Server-Side ActionScript

(Macromedia’s term for recording trace output), an Application.xml file must con-

tain the XML tag and value as follows:

<RecordAppLog>true</RecordAppLog>

Logging can create very large files over time, so it is often best to not make this

adjustment in an Application.xml file for an entire virtual host. An Application.xml

file can be placed in the home directory of the application that is being developed.

When logging is turned on, a stream file with an .flv extension and named after the

instance will be saved within a folder named after the application within the applica-

tions/admin/streams/logs/application directory. The file can be read using the Flash

Communication Server Log reader available as a separate download from Macrome-

dia. Please see Technote 16464:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/flashcom/ts/documents/flashcom_logging.

htm

There are other alternatives for generating log output and log files. Flash Remoting

can be used to send data to an application server where it can be stored in a data-

base or written to a text file. When Remoting is used, a custom logging function

must be called in place of trace( ). Similarly, custom Flash clients can receive data via

remote method calls where they can sort and analyze data before presenting it.

Remoting is described in Chapter 11, and remote method calls are covered in

Chapter 9. An application-level logging system is discussed in Chapter 12.

Organizing Test Scripts

During program development and testing, load( ) can be used to make testing of

many different SSAS files a little easier to manage. If you had to create a new applica-

tion home directory for every test script, you would end up with many different test

folders. One trick is to use different instances to test different scripts within a single

application home directory. One way to do this is to create a main.asc file with this

one statement in it:

load(application.name.split('/').pop( ) + ".asc");

Then you can create as many test files as you like in the application’s home direc-

tory. To run a test file, connect to an instance of your application with the same

name. Suppose, for example, you are working on an application named courseChat

and want to run different versions of the application’s main file. You may have sev-

eral main files named mainVersion1.asc, mainVersion2.asc, and so on. You can run

any one of these files by using the App Inspector to load the right instance name,

such as

courseChat/mainVersion2, and then reload it to check the output. If client

interaction is required, a test client can be set up to connect to rtmp:/courseChat/

mainVersion2.