Data driven CD-ROMs using Macromedia Director
21 August 2006, by Karl Bunyan
We've done a few data driven CD-ROMs over the past few years, and each one has had slightly different requirements and therefore a slightly different solution. All three were using Macromedia Director as the presentation engine, with programming in Lingo to pull out data and present it. 
We’ve done a few data driven CD-ROMs over the past few years, and each one has had slightly different requirements and therefore a slightly different solution. All three were using Macromedia Director as the presentation engine, with programming in Lingo to pull out data and present it. The projects, in order, were:
- Repute - Risk analysis tool
- Muraspec - Product selector
- RICS - Prospectus search
An outline of the approach for each follows.
Repute - Risk analysis tool
The Repute CD-ROM didn’t require a lot of data to be displayed so a set of custom objects were created to hold information about case studies including relevant issues tagged as keywords. This flexible structure allowed links between content on the CD to be generated automatically so the user was always presented with a ‘next step’ relevant case study.
The small amount of data, and the flexible way it was structured, meant it was a better option to use bespoke code in this case rather than integrate with a third party application.
Muraspec - Product selector
Muraspec had a product database (in Microsoft SQL Server) with over 2000 products in it. This was going to be used as the basis for data on the CD-ROM and so it made sense to investigate how a tool could be used to translate data from the database to a CD-based format on an automated regular basis. For this we chose to use the V12 system by Integration New Media. This still required a substantial amount of code to be written to perform the searches and display information on the screen but the basic data engine was already there.
RICS - Prospectus search
Having built a course search system for the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors in 2003 we were well placed to develop a similar system on a CD. Again, there was an existing database, and again it was on Microsoft SQL Server 2000, but in this case the searches were much simpler and the time taken to integrate with something such as V12, given the amount of code that would have to be written in any case, made it a better decision to write bespoke search code and a custom object structure.
Data updates were likely to be performed annually so there needed to be some way of refreshing it so we wrote some code in ASP.Net to produce the Lingo code we needed to generate the object structure in Director. It’s not a conventional approach but it works well for this project.
Summary
Integrating with third-party applications (known as Xtras) gives a lot of added functionality in Director, but generally there is still a lot of Lingo code to be written if there’s anything complex to be done. Some of the main considerations are:
- Cost of licensing a third-party tool
- The size of the data
- The complexity of the searches
- The format the original data is in
August 21, 2006 at 8:42 pm
Filed in: Front-end, Programming
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