AMS is one step closer to being, well... even remotely useful. It's still (barely!) not adding users to a PG's list... at the moment it's just pulling group information and setting up permissions. But even that's an accomplishment.

Plus, now that things are developing, I'm coming up with some better info on additional features/restrictions. Like, for instance, you can blame Angus for the whole automagical "if you add an Avatar, nobody else can" that'll be happening. It will be something an administrator can override, but... not commonly.

After sleeping... more fussing with this thing.

Okay, I've been up all night nickel-diming my way through the Flash chatposter... presently it reads a file from the MZDM server and tells you who you're logged in as. Big whoop, eh?

Well. It's seventy-five lines of code inside one object that allows it to contact MZDM, read an XML file, check for errors, report a problem if it can't locate the server, return an Avatar Number to "something else", and also allow something "else" to get a URL. When all is said and done, getting the URL is the "simple" one... just slap up a string, and add the Avatar Number to the end ;)

Eh... of course it also listens to the stage to check for a resize event... so it knows where to put itself (the upper right corner)...

Learned a lot about OOP in Flash. And just how many corners you can round off. Also noticed some places where the internal docs aren't quite right... and commented my code accordingly.

Lesse... stuff I added... the "AvatarManagerClass"... okay, that's about all I've done for tonight. Here's what its prototype is doing:

( Boring Stuff. )

Also, of course, have been pondering how to lay out the XML data for this... think I have a suitable solution:
<player>
<avatar number="membernumber">
Avatar Name
<card type="cardseries">cardnumber</card>
...
</avatar>
...
</player>

So... this is looking forward... the flash program will never care if you've got more than one card, or about any series other than the PA series. But the xml's schema should allow for people to both have multiple cards in the same series *cough*Oralee*cough*, and have multiple series.

So, for an example (down the line):

<player>
   <avatar number="2173">
      Krinele Fullin
      <card type="pa">411</card>
      <card type="elt">3</card>
   </avatar>
   <avatar number="632">
      Datallon Implaro
      <card type="pa">312</card>
      <card type="nc4">1</card>
   </avatar>
   <avatar number="3189">
      Kivie
   </avatar>
</player>

I mean, I'm not sure what we'd use such a structure for in outputting a format usable almost exclusively by programs built by the Dat... but it's something to be aware of the possibility of, and thus program for.

When programming, be prepared to abandon all work you've done on some code to come at it from a different angle. This, honestly, is absolutely key.

I've been doing things recently where I've had to drop everything and start from scratch... and the Projector's about to get much the same treatment. It'll be fun, in the sense that chalking up several months of straight programming and a couple years worth of patching to "experience, better luck next time" is fun.

Ah, well. c'est la vie. I shall have a more productive system when I'm done... I just have to work out all that it needs to do. I'm thinkin' a complicated flowchart or somethin'.

Spent hours tracking down an error in my code after I broke it up for Karol. Turns out one of those temp variables that I needed and had to come up with a meaningful name for... I forgot the name for it 10 seconds later when I needed it again, and typed something similar.

Yes, it was still on the same screen, but... this only goes to show.

"$yap" is a perfectly good temp variable name as long as you can remember it. All the meaning in the world can't help if it's just going to be misspelled.