We start by opening your XIMPEL application in a web browser with the latest version of the Flash plugin installed. The URL in your browser should look somewhat similar to the following URL examples:
- http://ximpel.few.vu.nl/ximpelApp.swf (online)
- file:///C:/myapps/ximpelApp.swf (locally in Windows with Firefox)
Variables for ximpelApp are defined with the following notation: [some URL]/ximpelApp.swf?config=config1.xml The question mark '?' denotes the part of the URL where variables can be defined in name-value pairs. For ximpelApp two variables are used:
- config: the location of the configuration file
- playlist: the location of the playlist
Both file locations are relative to ximpelApp.swf. Furthermore, variable names are case sensitive. This means that config are Config are two different variables. To more than one variable at once, we use the ampersand (&). So if we want to load both a configuration file and a playlist at once, we input:
- [some URL]/ximpelApp.swf?config=config1.xml&playlist=p1.xml
- Variables have priority over other ways of setting the configuration file and playlist. This also means that when you use both the config and playlist variables at the same time, the playlist variable has priority over the playlist that might be defined in the configuration file that you are loading with the config variable!
- The values of the variables must be URL encoded. You can escape special and nonprintable characters with a percent symbol (%) followed by a two-digit hexadecimal value. You can represent a single blank space using the plus sign (+). The encoding for variables is the same as the page. Internet Explorer provides UTF-16-compliant strings on the Windows platform. Netscape sends a UTF-8-encoded string to Flash Player. Most browsers support a flashVars String or query string up to 64 KB (65535 bytes) in length. They can include any number of name-value pairs.