Movieclips as templates that fill with external media and info

[sergiopol]

Hello guys. I need to create a standalone presentation showing info of houses on a specific street. I have a "home" with a Google map of the aforementioned street and houses. I will use that map as a menu where the user would click on a house and then a module of related info would spread. It'd contain a slideshow of pictures taken inside and outside the house, the house address and some info about it.

I was thinking that the best way to do it it would be having those modules as a movieclip template that I create once and then make it call the info from a folder inside the project directory or another swf movie. My idea is to have folders for each house and then I would place the photos and a doc with the info related to each house.

Years ago I worked with flash and now that i'm using animate and actionscript 3 things seem very different. Is it possible to achieve it with animate? Can you point me to a tutorial where I can learn to do it? Or maybe tell me what to search for in google since I'm having little luck.

Thank you very much for the help.

[dmennenoh]

I see no reason to have external movie clips. I would probably place everything in some database - either a real one or just a simple JSON or even XML doc. Personally I'd use JSON. You can keep all the text info in there easily and then you can put in a list of images for the house and load those as needed.

And yes this is not an issue to do in Animate.

[sergiopol]

Well I never meant external movie clips, maybe I explained myself poorly. I meant an internal movie clip -just one- that would fill up dynamically with the info and media of each house. By dynamically I mean the info would change according to user input. However that option sounds interesting yet a bit complicated for someone hearing "JSON" or "XML" for the first time. Do you think it would be something achievable with a manageable investment of time? Thank you for your response.

[dmennenoh]

It's certainly doable. However if this is the first time you're hearing JSON or XML... you may want to tackle something a bit lighter first. JSON is simple - it's just standard object notation in Flash. It's just like XML in that it's like a simple text based database. JSON is just lighter (not so verbose).

Yes, what you described should work well - one internal MC formatted how you want that you can load up with external content.

[sergiopol]

I see dmennenoh, I'll take a look at JSON and give it a try. Thank you very much.