Putting variables into flash from asp and access

[country_gail]

I'm working with a group of veterinarians that would like a graphical interphase of the state to determine a status of a disease by county. They would like it updated weekly so I thought that it would be nice to come up with an asp/access/flash type thing that I just change the numbers in the database, and it can update the flash.

What I would like it to do is to first come up with a map of the state, the user would click on a county and the county name, total number of herds inthe county, number of infected herds in the county and the percent of infected herds (a number that can be gotten through a little math).

So far, what I've got is a state map that when you click on the counties, it shows the county name. It doesn't get anything from outside yet. Now I could probably pull in information, one county at a time (they click on a county, it goes to the asp, database table, asp, flash) but this doesn't seem very efficient because it would have to do do this for every county they click on.

What I was hoping for was a way to get all of the info into flash, right at the start, even if it doesn't necessarily use it.

Another thing that would be kind of cool with such a thing would be to have counties change colors according to their disease status. Which would be possible if I can get all of the info into it.

It's going to be a big project (My state has 87 counties!) but it would be very cool and could be applied towards other things too.

Do you guru's think it's possible? Is there anything I could look at that might point the way on how to do such a thing?

[tg]

you could grab all of the data at once, but i think your original idea of getting the data for a specific county is probably better, unless the docs will for sure look at every county. if they are only looking a 1-3 countys at a time, you wont want to load data for the entire state. right? the asp/flash connection should ge really fast.

are you familiar with asp/db programming? if so, then this my be a pretty easy solution.
who will be in charge of updating the data? the docs?
what will the docs be doing with the data upon retrieval? typing it into a spreadsheet? or something else?

these can be pretty important questions for the overall structure of a project.
for instance you could also do the whole thing via a spreadsheet.... excell does a pretty decent job of exporting to xml, you could use excell to do all the data entry, export to xml, and load the xml into flash, then if the docs want a copy of the data for other reasons... like meetings, you could give them a place to download the excell spreadsheet.
for data entry, most everyone knows how to type stuff into excell. you could totally automate the save/export to xml process with vba etc.

if your familiar with asp/access, that will probably be an easy option for you, but if not, it can become a real bear when looking at the overall process.

[country_gail]

Thanks for the reply. I guess having flash take numbers from an excel sheet would be the easiest. The vets really like their numbers and get around in excel really well, but other than that they are pretty computer illiterate. Recently, I taught them a new trick though, ftp, and surprisingly enough, they took to it really well! haha So, if I could figure out how to get big bunches of numbers from excel into the map swf, that would be great, even better than asp and access.

The reason I mentioned asp and access is because I've already got a start on that through a couple of other simple projects, but it will still be a big learning curve so I guess it really doesn't matter.

If anyone knows any good tutorials online, let me know. At the moment, I found one out of advance-media.com that I'm taking a close look at to hopefully point me in the direction I need to go.

Thanks.

[tg]

freddycodes has a great way to populate flash from a csv file.... if you don't want to do the whole xml thing.

[tg]

doh! forgot the link:
http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=30052&highlight=csv