Important Flash security instructions

For security purposes, Flash players 6r47 and later do not allow SWF's to read XML (or RSS) files that are located on a server other than the server that is hosting the SWF file. This will probably be the scenario in most of your cases ad generally, RSS files (such as newsfeeds) reside on external webservers. You will still be able to view the RSS contents using the rssReader when viewing your SWF locally, however this will not work when you upload the file to the webserver.

The solution is to upload a permissions file to your webserver for each RSS URL that you wish to read using the rssReader. This permissions contains the URL of the RSS to read. This file must reside on the same webserver as the SWF file and you would specify the name and URL of the permissions file in the RSS Source parameter instead.

For further instructions and to download the permissions file type most suited to you, please see the following Macromedia link:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/ts/documents/load_xdomain.htm#proxy

The sections that you should read is called "Server-side proxy method". If you have PHP installed on your webserver, we recommend using the PHP solution, else if you have ASP then you go with the ASP option. If you have PHP 3 installed on your webserver and you select the PHP option, you must install that the file name ends in ".php3" instead of ".php".

Note: You should implement this method in all situations where you are reading in an external RSS file, in order to ensure that viewers with all versions of Flash Player 6 or 7 can see the contents of your RSS data.

Example using PHP security file:

In this example, we'll be loading accessing the RSS file of the New York Times news. The URL for this RSS file is: http://partners.userland.com/nytRss/nytHomepage.xml

1. Download the PHP file from the Macromedia website. You can downoad this file by clicking here.

2. Open the PHP file in any text editor (for example, Notepad or Textedit). You should see the following:

<?php

$dataURL = "http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/resources/macromedia_resources.xml";

//note that this will not follow redirects
readfile($dataURL);

?>

3. Go to the line starting with "$dataURL = " and replace the URL with the URL of the RSS file that you would like read. In our example, the results should look like this:

<?php

$dataURL = "http://partners.userland.com/nytRss/nytHomepage.xml";

//note that this will not follow redirects
readfile($dataURL);

?>

4. Save this PHP file under a new name, we'll call it: nytimes.php

5. Upload this new PHP file to your webserver.

6. Go back to the rssReader or rssReader-FT properties panel and change the RSS Source parameter to be the complete URL of the nytimes.php file that you just uploaded to your webserver. For example:

http://www.yoururl.com/rssfeeds/nytimes.php

 

That's it!

You must create a separate PHP file for each external RSS file that you wish to access from your site.