Question

I’m creating an (desktop) application with flex but AIR is not an option. (I’ve heard you need air-installer to play the .exe) My flex app needs to load a php generated xml but it has to run from the swf file when you export a release build.

When testing my flex application on the localhost, everything is fine. The xml is loaded and I get the data.
However after i export a release build, and launch the .swf, I get security voilation (sandbox) saying it cannot load the xml from the webpage.

Does anybody know a way around this?
Does anybody know if the air installer really is necessairy to launch the .exe? (i only have a mac)

Answer 1

Due to security limitations of the Flash Player you are running in a sandbox. If you launch the application SWF it will have a URL something like file:///path/to/my/app, which puts it in a local file sadbox (which is the most restrictive place to run a swf). AIR gives you a local file system sandbox also, but you gain the ability to access local files and save to disk. If you are running a swf from http://example.com you are in the example.com context ad can load content from that domain. If you need to load content from another domain, you will need a crossdomain.xml policy file on the other domain where the content/service lives.

alt text http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer9_security/fig01.gif

This article explains, in great detail, the concept of the crossdomain.xml file. Here is an example that allows a conection from ANY domain to resources:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<cross-domain-policy>
    <allow-access-from domain="*" />
    <site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="master-only"/>
</cross-domain-policy>

which would work in your case.