xavi colomer's blog

Hello People!

It has been a long time since my last post so I’ve decided to post something found interesting. Long ago, seeking a faster way to create my websites I found CMS called Drupal, this CMS provides a lot of very important aspects of a web, such as content creation, scalability and robustness. But as you know this blog is basically based on the Flash platform technologies, not Drupal, But I was interested in joining the two sides and make a login.

To follow this tutorial is recommended that you have some knowledge of Drupal and Flex

Requirements

Have a server ( local or remote ) with Drupal

Note:

This tutorial was mad with Drupal 6.x but I think you can do it perfectly with the previous version 5.x

To complete this tutorial you will need some modules that do not come with the core ( amfphp and services ) as well as the amfphp server. To install the modules simply unzip them inside drupal_folder/modules but i recommend creating a folder drupal_folder/sites/all/modules and copy them inside. Then it¡s imperative you download the amfphp server and copy the the folder inside the amfphp. ( You should have something like this drupal_folder/modules/amfphp/amfphp, the first amfphp is the module logic and the second is the server.

Now we must activate some options of the modules we just install

- In Services activate Services ( it’s the only option, you can fail here xD )
- In Services – servers activate AMFPHP
- In Services – services activate System Service and User Service

You can go to the Drupal Services option and click on the AMFPHP server, you would see a default message from the server, if you can’t see it you may missed something.

One more thing before view the Actionscript code, in the Drupal Services menu, inside the Settings Tab, disable the “Use Keys” option which is used to provide security when we connect from external applications, and althought this tutorial might be used to create an external login too, we won’t use keys to simplify the tutorial ( maybe in a next post ) however we will leave the “Use sessid” active.

Once you have activate that options ( remember to save once you’ve activated ) we need to give permissions for anyone to access the services, if not an anonymous user couldn’t login because it couldn’t access them. Now we can begin to create our AS3

Before giving the Actionscript code I would like to discuss some aspects of the code:

While creating remoteObjects is easier in mxml I always prefer to avoid it using Actionscript but this meant more time until I found the way to communicate Flex with Drupal because I couldn’t how I could pass parameters to Drupal, if you’ve encountered the same problem, I hope this tutorial help.

Note:
Before communicating with any other service you must have your sessid, you’ll do that connecting with the system.connect service, which will return you an object containing the sessid. If you do not know if your services are working correctly because of your code or because of Drupal, you can execute them directly from the Drupal Services menu, there you can find all the parameters you need to execute any service.

Using MXML remoteObject is implemented like this ( using user.get as example ) :
id=”test”
endpoint=”http://localhost/drupal/services/amfphp”
destination=”amfphp”
source=”user”
result=”handler_drupalResult( event )”
fault=”handler_drupalFault( event )”>

sessid
1

This service is used to get the information about the user with a certain uid ( user id ). In order to do that you must be logged in.

In Actionscript should be something like this:

drupal.source = “user”
var params:Object = new Object();
params.sessid = sessid;
params.uid = 1
Operation(drupal.getOperation( “get” )).argumentNames = ["sessid","uid"]
drupal.getOperation( “get” ).arguments = params;
drupal.getOperation( “get” ).send();

The lined marked in bold is the one I was searching during hours, this is automatically implemented in the mxml component, if you don’t put it Drupal will always return “Missing Arguments”

Finally, the code:

I hope you find this usefull!!