Flash to JPG image Module

[phrequency]

Here's something I have not been able to find info about, any help would be awesome:

I would like to allow people to create greeting cards online.
The process in a nutshell is:
1. User picks from array of templates
2. user uploads their image and places within template
3. User has minimal image manipulation controls (Brightness, rotation, size, etc)
4. User is able to add text.
5. When user is happy with card, click "order" or something like that and we get a compiled JPG or Bitmap file of the whole shabang ready to be printed high quality.

I have seen these things on: http://www.mycardmaker.com but we'd like the final output to be an image that is sent to us via server or email or whatever.

I am guessing that there will need to be some kind of backend script (PHP most likely but Cold Fusion would be ideal) but I am not sure.

Please help...

Thanks in advance...

Phreq

[jaybee]

coldfusion is well able to handle this but you're not likely to be able to do it all within flash, cos you can't create a form that uploads files...apparently you can get round this with hidden frames with forms in etc - there is a component at http://www.romiglia.com/esenciales/index.html that does so, but I tried the demo and it hung....also 3rd party apps like swfstudio can do it.....

but the simplest solution would just be to put a little form in a frame or elsewhere on your page and let the users upload the images to the server that way then make use of them in flash....set the form enctype like this

<form enctype="multipart/form-data"

and put inputs of type="file" then on the coldfusion template that is the action page of your form you need a tag like this


<cffile action="upload" fileField="nameOfField" destination="c:\website\files\" accept="image/jpg">


unless you want to save it into a database in which case you'd read it into a variable with cffile and save the binary data.........

trouble is you need to know when this has been done back in your movie, which is the problem....I've never thought about it before and not really sure how you would know when to move on....:confused: maybe you could rename the image using the CFID of the user as an identifier, then use some javascript in the form to address the movie and say "the forms on it's way", and after that check every 10 seconds to see whether an image(s) exists with the CFID of this user.......? clearly that's a bit of a mess, I'm sure someone has a better idea;)

[phrequency]

Thanks JayBee for replying. We ar getting closer all the time.

What I am not clear about, and perhaps you will know something about it, lets say in the flash document I have three movie clips, one with the image that was uploaded, one with a frame around it (think christmas Card) and then some text over that.

What I'd like to do is be able to "flatten" all three into one main image that gets sent to me. Make sense?

Any ideas? Is this something that is rather "standard" or am I missing something?

Thanks again for the reply.

Phreq...

[jaybee]

the easiest thing would be to send people a link to a page that would recreate the card, or a html email that contained a swf with the right parameters embedded....(*thinks* how many email clients would open a html formatted email with a flash movie in it? maybe none? dunno...) - best way may be the link. I don't know of a utility that would flatten or capture your swf to an image file, but I'd think you could find something - in php something like ming (http://uk2.php.net/ming) may do it, or in CF there may be CFX tags available...