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This partially did what I wanted. It returns all the UNIQUE artist_id. I want essentially a sample item for EACH artist.

The Solution:

This returns ONE row for each artist. I found this on a blog, I cant remember the name but when I find it again I will post credit. I hope this helps some of you.

The reason I describe this as less than best practice is because when you send data to the sever you get no response. So, even though it works 99.9 per cent of the time, you do not get a confirmation that the server received your request.

All my client wants is for a user to be able to enter his / her email address in to a box and have and email sent and then add that email address to an email. So really we are just sending some text to my client from a form. We want the user to enter the text and click send and have it be sent without another browser window opening.

The model for this is as follows: flash will send data to a URL with the POST method and a PHP file will get the data and send an email to my client.

So we need 2 things:

The actionscript...

and the PHP:

Long Story short, I tried it. It makes a huge difference and it is scary to think that I might never have come across that feature. When you import an image to the library (jpg, gif, or png), right click it and select properties. When you do that there will be an option called "Allow Image Smoothing." I do not know of any drawbacks to this yet but I do know that it makes a huge difference when animating images.

I came across font embedding for a different reason.? I wanted to put dynamic text on the screen and then modify some of its properties.? I tried to change the alpha of the text and quickly realized that it did not work.

When you embed the font with the SWF flash actually renders the text which allows you to apply filters to the text and change properties such as the alpha.? This is not possible with out embedding.

Embedding is easy!

Start first in your Flash IDE and right click inside the library.? Then click "New Font..." select the font you want, name it whatever you want, and click ok.? Note:? If you are using a font and you also want to use a bold face of the font you need to import them separately.

Now you should see the font listed in your library.

Now for the fun part:? right click the font in your library and click "linkage."? When the linkage window opens check "export for actionscript" and pick a class name that you will remember.? For Futura Medium I chose "FuturaMed."

Now you can access the font with actionscript!

Lets go in to the actions panel and write a little code.

First we need to create a font object:

var myFont:Font = new FuturaMed();
This creates a new instance of the font we embedded in the Flash library.? Notice that the font object name "FuturaMed" should be the same as the Class name you gave your font on the linkage panel.

There is really not much else left to do.? For the sake of saving space I wiill refer to my previous post Let’s make a text field appear.? We just need to change a few more things to apply the font object to the text.? First we need to attach the font to our textFormat object.? In the last example I used and object called "textFormat."

textFormat.font = myFont.fontName;
Now the font object is attached to the textFormat object that is applied to your textField object.

You would probably assume, like I did, that it would just work now.? Nope.? You need to add one more line of code to your textField object.
myText.embedFonts = true;

Now you are all set.? Below I will include the complete code for this exercise so you can see it all together.

As a developer I prefer to create as much content as I can with AS because it gives me more flexibility and also allows me to create objects like a text field on the fly dynamically.

For this example we are working in the Actions panel of the Flash IDE.

The first thing you need to do is create a variable to hold the text field object:

var myText:TextField = new TextField();

Next I want to make sure that the text field expands to match the text that I assign to it. In this case I want the text field to expand to the left:

myText.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT;

Now that we have created the text field we can go ahead and put some data in to it:

myText.text = "Hello world!"

At this point if you run your program you will not see anything even though you did everything correctly. What you need to do it add the text field to the stage. You can do that with a very simple command:

addChild(myText);

Now if you look you have text on the stage when you run your movie.

Okay... that was great right? What if we want to add formatting to the text?

As you might have guessed we created another object to contain our formatting information:

var textFormat:TextFormat = new Format();

Now that we have a place to store the formatting information we can set the font and the size of the formatting object.

textFormat.size = 20;
textFormat.color = 0xFF0000;

If you are wondering what 0xFF0000 is... it is red in hex format. Flash likes its colors defined in hex.

textFormat.font = "Helvetica";

The font needs to be installed on your computer. If Helvetica does not work try Arial.

Now we need to apply the formatting to the text object we created earlier.

myText.setTextFormat(textFormat);

Now you should have text on your screen formatted to your liking. As you might expect you can apply your text formatting object over and over to whatever text objects you want. This is great because like CSS it allows you to change all your text of a similar type with one bit of code instead of going in to the IDE and changing every field one by one.

Here is the code:

In the next entry we will discuss some problems that can occur when you try to animate a text field and how it can be solved by embedding fonts.