I'm looking for advice on how to dynamically create content in flash based on a database. Initially I was thinking that we would export the database to an XML file and use the built in Actionscript XML parser to take care of that, however the size of the XML file may prove prohibitive.
I have read about using an intermediary step (PHP, ASP) to retrieve information and pass it back as something that Actionscript can read, but I would prefer not to do that if possible. Has anyone worked with the asSQL libraries before? Or is there something else that I am missing?
Unless you're running your Actionscript on the server side (I doubt that), connecting to a database directly wouldn't be very smart at all. To connect to a database from client side Actionscript you'd have to open your server to accept database connections from everyone, and you'd have to store access data in your swf files and that would be a disastrous combination in case someone disassembles the swf files.
If the size of the XML is prohibitive, you can always split it somehow, or if it is impossible, you can get the data from the server through PHP or anything else running on the server, for example, you'd give the relevant parameters in the request to the PHP file and the server side script then queries the database, builds XML text (that is a subset of the complete data, based on the given parameters) that can be consumed by the Actionscript.