philwickham.com - drupal powered flash

I think you're creating a bunch of extra steps for yourself. You know that you can also return arrays and structs right? These things are turned into xml automatically by xmlrpc, and then turned back into an array or struct in flash. You're talking about having to write code to create the xml on the server and then even more code to parse the xml on the flash end. This would create a lot of overhead as well especially on the flash end since you would be first running an xmlparse on the returned xmlrpc data, and then after that's done, on your custom xml.

This is my xmlrpc taxonomy.getTerms(vid) function in Drupal:

function flashapi_xmlrpc()
{
  return array(
    array(
      'flashapi.getTerms',
      'flashapi_get_terms',
      array('struct', 'string', 'int'),
      t('Returns the terms in a specific vocab.')));

}

function flashapi_get_terms($appkey, $vid) {
  
  $app = flashapi_validate_app($appkey);
  if($app !== true) {
    return flashapi_error($app);
  }
  
  $tree = taxonomy_get_tree($vid);
  
  return $tree;
}

And then my as2 class using mattism looks something like this

import mx.utils.Delegate;

import com.mattism.http.xmlrpc.Connection;
import com.mattism.http.xmlrpc.ConnectionImpl;
import com.mattism.http.xmlrpc.util.XMLRPCDataTypes;

class Drupal {

      public function getView(_view_name:String, _fields, _args:Array, _callback:Function):Void
	{
		var args:Array = new Array(new Array(_view_name, XMLRPCDataTypes.STRING),
															 new Array(_fields, XMLRPCDataTypes.ARRAY),
															 new Array(_args, XMLRPCDataTypes.ARRAY));
										
		_call(METHOD_GET_VIEW, args, _callback);
	}

      private function _call(_method:String, _args:Array, _callback:Function):Void
	{
		var rpc:Connection = new ConnectionImpl(_getServerURL());
		
		if (!_callback) {
			_callback = Delegate.create(this, _onResponse);
		}
		
		rpc.onLoad = _callback;
		
		rpc.addParam(APPKEY, XMLRPCDataTypes.STRING);
		
		for (var i:Number=0; i<_args.length; i++) {
			rpc.addParam(_args[i][0], _args[i][1]);
		}
		rpc.call(_method);
	}
}

so now to call the function we do this somwhere in our movie.

import Drupal.as;
import mx.utils.Delegate;

drupal = new Drupal();

drupal.getTerms(1, Delegate.create(this, onTermsLoaded));

function onTermsLoaded(_terms) {
	// _terms should be a multidimensional array or an object. 
}

Make sense?

This is not funcitonal code. You will have to make some changes in order to use it. I will post working code sometime soon.

Yeah that's what I meant when I said "I guess it comes down to what the usage would be". I can't really think of any other practical usage of defining a drupal xmlrpc api beside flash apps. While that by itself is worth it, I agree in that I don't think many core devs would jump to make this happen. Maybe custom offline editors? Or perhaps for better communication between sites, syncing content etc.? I don't know. I'm considering getting the effort started on this though. I know I would use it :)