Is it possible to build a Flash movie that will be distributed on a CD that
uses a database to populate certain parts of the movie?

Thanks

Im pretty sure you would need to use serverside technologies to make flash talk to a database - but Im always ready to be proved wrong

Unfortunately, the Flash projector in and of itself won't allow you to do
anything with the local disk or pass any parameters to the local system. The
only "doorway" in and out of the Flash projector is via the fscommand, (which
only talks to the ActiveX control and only lets you send one parameter).

There are a few products on the market that will allow you to create a Flash
presentation and then do various things on the local system. They all work by
wrapping either the projector application or the activeX control. One of the
best of these is .swf studio by http://flashjester.com makes a similar product,
but I found it to be more awkward and buggy than the NorthCode product.
Admittedly, that was several builds ago, and they have likely improved since
then.

The best option, of course is to use Director as a wrapper. Director includes
a lot of powerful plug-ins called "Xtras" that let you do all kinds of neat
stuff.

Trouble is, it's very expensive, and if you want ot use all that funky
ActionScript 2 stuff, you'll have to upgrade to the latest version of Director
MX2004.


I hope this helps

.... Just thought of something:

If your data is static and you don't need to use relational tables, why not
load your data from text files using the loadVariables command or the loadVars
or xml object? You can do that directly from the projector without any fancy
add-ons and it works quite well.

You can name the files anything you like to discourage users from poking
around inside them. If you have to send hierarchical data, you can use
delimited strings [strokeData=#FFCC00|2|221,223,345,223,453,432,101] or xml.