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Consuming the CMX Web Service with Flash - Part 2

By: Tom Muck

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Community MX publishes a web service that displays information about the latest content available from the site. This service can be used by anyone who knows how to consume a web service. Content of Community MX is copyright ©2003 by Community MX and cannot be redistributed. However, you may use the web service on your own site to show a list of what is available on CMX. The first part of this article is at http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=E5EA2A608932F770. To follow along, you will need the following:

• Flash MX
• ColdFusion MX server
• Flash Remoting client components

The first article showed a simple interface to the Community MX web service built in Flash. To recap, a web service is created to communicate, using standard XML formats, to any application that knows how to talk to it. The web service will have a public interface written in Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The Community MX web service utilizes a standard .wsdl file that can be consumed by any technology that can consume a web service. The web service is located at http://www.communitymx.com/services/cmxfeed.wsdl. The web service exposes four methods:

• getContent: grabs the latest content descriptions available from Community MX
• searchContent: searches the content at Community MX
• getContentTypes: retrieves a list of the latest content types, articles, extensions, etc., for your application to aid in using the searchContent method
• getTip*: grabs the latest tip from Community MX

*not implemented yet

Using the searchContent() Method (Example 1)

The searchContent() method allows the consumer of the web service to search the content at Community MX, and return the matching content to your program. There are several arguments to this method, as can be seen by examining the WSDL file:

<wsdl:message name ="searchContentRequest" >
  <wsdl:part name="search" type ="SOAP-ENC:string" />
  <wsdl:part name="anyWords" type ="SOAP-ENC:string" />
  <wsdl:part name="exactPhrase" type ="SOAP-ENC:string" />
  <wsdl:part name="contentType" type ="SOAP-ENC:string" />
  <wsdl:part name="contentDate" type ="SOAP-ENC:string" />
</wsdl:message>

All of the arguments are strings, but they need some explanation:

• search: the search word or words. This can be individual words, comma-separated words, or phrases
• anyWords: set this to true to match any of the search words (the default is "all words")
• exactPhrase: set this to true to match an exact phrase
• contentType: set this to 0 for all, or you can match one of the CMX content types, which can be retrieved using the getContentTypes() method of the service
• contentDate: search the content based on a time period, as number of days (the default is 30)

The Community MX web service was built in ColdFusion, and uses the same mechanism for searching our site content that the site search feature uses. The following step-by-step tutorial will work in Flash MX. The download package contains the example .fla files in Flash MX and Flash MX 2004 format.

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Keywords
Flash,Flash MX,Flash MX 2004,ColdFusion,web service,wsdl,soap