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24JAN13

Uploading video from iPad to server with AIR for iOS

9 years ago

In this part 2 post following on from Record and play back video with AIR for iOS on iPad I will show you how to take your freshly recorded video and upload it to a web server using PHP.

Assuming you have a MovieClip or some other button labeled ‘uploadbtn’ you first need to add a click event handler to it to trigger the upload.

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uploadbtn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onUpload);

Now for the click handler:

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function onUpload(e:MouseEvent):void
{
    // create a URLRequest for the PHP file on you server (we'll get to the PHP later)
    var URLrequest:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://www.yourdomain.com/uploadFile.php");
   
    // videoFile is a File object we created in the last post which references the recorded video
    // attach the various listeners for errors, progress, complete
    videoFile.addEventListener(DataEvent.UPLOAD_COMPLETE_DATA, uploadDataComplete);
    videoFile.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, progressHandler);
    videoFile.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, handleError);
    videoFile.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, completeHandler);
   
    // call upload on the File object and pass in the URLRequest
    videoFile.upload(URLrequest);
}

Now we can create the handlers for the attached listeners:

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function progressHandler(e:ProgressEvent):void
{
    // just tracing the percentage of progress - you could show it in a progress bar
    trace("Uploading... " + Math.ceil(100 * (e.bytesLoaded / e.bytesTotal)) + "%");
}

function completeHandler(e:Event):void
{
    // upload process is complete
    trace(videoFile.name + " has been uploaded.\n");
}

function uploadDataComplete(e:DataEvent):void
{
    //everything is complete, trace the message returned from the PHP script which is in XML format
    var xml:XML = new XML(e.data);
   
    trace(xml.message);
}



function handleError(e:IOErrorEvent):void
{
    // simple error handler traces the error
    trace("Upload Error:" + e.text);
}

That is all that is required for the ActionScript side of things. Now for the PHP script. This is a very basic script and you should provide some security and validation on any production code.

All you need to do is save this into a blank PHP file and upload it to your server to the location matching the address in you URLRequest above.

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<?php

// variable for return message
$message = "";

// the directory to place the video relative to this PHP script
$directory = "uploads/";

// get the number of files already in the directory and increment the number for the new one
// video from the iPad is always .MOV format
$fileCount = count (glob ($directory."*.MOV"));
$newName = $directory."video" . ( $fileCount + 1) . ".MOV";

// move uploaded file with new name into directory specified above
if (move_uploaded_file($_FILES["Filedata"]["tmp_name"], $newName)){
    // create a successful message if all went ok
    $message =  "<result><status>OK</status><message>$file_name uploaded successfully.</message></result>";
}else{
    // create a failed message if something went wrong
    $message =  "<result><status>FAIL</status><message>$file_name did not upload successfully.</message></result>";
}

echo $message;
?>

That is all that’s required to upload a video from the iPad to a web server. It is surprisingly simple for how hard it was for me to work out.

I hope this helps somebody out!

08SEP12

Emailing images directly from Flash with PHP

9 years ago

For an interactive drawing project I worked on recently I needed to provide the ability for users to email their artwork directly from the app without the need to save any images to a server. I pieced together a solution from various blogs and websites and I decided to provide the full source here.

The function below takes an encoded bitmapdata and an email address and sends them to the PHP script further down in this post. The bytearray passed in must be encoded as a JPG – you can use any of the available encoders such as CoreLib, Faster JPG Encoder, or the Alchemy Encoder.

READ MORE

22AUG12

Using PHP to dynamically display the current year

9 years ago

Update 20-9-1012: As Kimonoki pointed out in the comments, this can actually be done in one line. There is no need to store the $time variable as the second parameter for date() is optional and defaults to time(). I have updated the snippet below.

I am posting this for reference for myself as I find it super handy but always forget. This snippet when added to your PHP page will display the current year which is really handy for copyright statements in page footers. After using this you will never forget to update the date again!

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// displays the copyright symbol and the year
<p>&copy; <?php echo date("Y"); ?></p>