Alright, currently I have my SWF hitting a php file that will go and find all the files I specify to it, add their sizes together and return their combined sizes as one number. I then use this number with a ProgressEvent listener to determine the current percentage of files downloading for that particular section of the website.
Pretty straightforward right? Well now using that PHP file is out of the question and I’m attempting to do everything inside the SWF instead of having it hit an outside script to get the numbers I need.
Is there any good way to get a file’s size BEFORE I start loading it into flash? I really need the preloader to be a 0 to 100% preloader so I need the total number of bytes I will be downloading before it actually starts.
One thought I had was to just go through the array holding the file URLs, start loading them, getTotalBytes without displaying any loading, kill the load on the first tick, add up all those total bytes numbers, and then start the actual downloading process. This method seems very ugly and it will be a huge time waste as every time the user hits a pre loader on the site it will probably take a second or two to run through all the files, find their total and then actually start downloading.
Is there a better solution to this problem without going outside of flash to get the size of those files?
You could do an HTTP HEAD request to the server for the files. This will return the header info (including file size) but not the actual file. You could then make a GET request to load the files.
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html
(Check out section 9.4 HEAD)
What I would probably do is a two tier progress bar (with 2 progress bars). One showing overall progress (0 to 100%) and one showing per file progress (as each file is downloaded).
That way, as long as you know the number of files to load, you can do the total progress without first having to hit the server to get the file sizes.
mike chambers
mesh@adobe.com