Arrays in Rev

[Mark Brownell]

On Friday, December 10, 2004, at 05:28 PM, Troy Rollins wrote:

> But... Lingo's are REAL.
>
> AFAICT... you are using strings... which *look* like multidimensional 
> arrays, yet they would not *work* like multi-dimensional arrays. It 
> looks to me more like you have a mechanism which allows *naming* and 
> storing of variables in the same context as a multi-dimensional array. 
> It looks like your version is basically a way to avoid coming up with 
> unique names for a lot of variables... which is cool, and all, but 
> that's all it is.

It's not a panacea for all. I needed to store sub level data that is 
associated with other data located at the same location. Think of it as 
a storage container like nodes within other elements in an XML 
document. I even use it to store binary data like images that are 
encoded as base64. My goal was to have a storage container that I could 
use a pull-parser on to go directly to the data I needed in one quick 
call without having to use Rev's XML. This is because I fully intended 
to include not well formed XML in the document. This allowed me to work 
with data in the original storage format and thus produce simpler 
handler libraries.

> But how do they perform the same functions? For instance with a 
> multi-level nested repeat loop iterating over the contents with a real 
> multi-dimensional array? Or is there some equally convoluted code to 
> do that?

If you mean testing data to see if it's the correct data to be accessed 
like doing a search in a Lingo list then I break up each data table row 
as an XML element with the sub data of that row as other elements 
within the "row" tag-set

Example row element:

<row>
   <map>Cleveland</map>
   <image> ... base64Encodded data of image here... </image>
</row>

What I do is use the pull-parser to create an array of <row> objects 
with the map and image data inside each object as elements of their 
own. To find the map for Cleveland I loop through the row array until I 
find this element: "<map>Cleveland</map>." When that is found I return 
the data found in that row's  <image> element. This is accomplished 
real fast using the offset() function to do a string search on each row 
object during the loop.

> Don't get me wrong. Cool solutions I can respect. But what works for 
> you (or I) as a personal solution is not necessarily something which 
> is portable to others - nor is it necessarily what they want or need.
> --
> Troy

Wanting to use a pull-parser on a structured document is exactly what I 
wanted. This is the same document as the storage document. So my 
solution is great for my needs. I share it because a few here might 
like its simplicity and find uses for it themselves.  I did come from 
Director to Revolution. Revolution is so cool I never looked back. I 
really got sick of Director changing shockwave to such a degree that 
the new shockwave plug-ins would render my third party plug-ins 
inoperative unless I redeveloped my creations to work with the 
shockwave changes.  I can't speak for others and what their needs are.

Mark