Ok, imagine the scenario where you have a number of movies on the page, and each movie has to have the capability of sending and recieving data from and to any of the other movies.
To achieve this with LocalConnection you have to use a little bit of trickery, because LocalConnection only allows one movie to listen to any given channel at any one time, yet any number of movies can send data along that channel. I have just come across this situation with some work i am doing and my first thought was to create a unique listening channel for each movie with each of the other movies…..
I am using four movies on one page and they all need to be able to send and recieve data to each other using LocalConnection. Therefore with my original thought i would need to create 12 unique channels for each of them to be able to send and recieve to each of the others, the more movies their are on the page, the higher the number of channels will be. Instead i decided to create a relay movie, a fifth movie, which creates a unique listening channel which each of the other four movies on the page, then each of those four movies create a unique listening channel with the relay movie. So we now effectively have a relay system, where each of the four movies on the page can send and recieve data from and to the relay movie using only 8 unique channels as opposed to 12. For any of those four movies to communicate with each other they send a message to the relay movie, which in turn relays the message to each of the other movies and my problem is solved. This solution to a problem, may come in handy for those people worried about the amount of memory each channel uses on the local computer as it obviously reduces that amount by atleast half, the more channels there are, the memory that is used, thus reducing the number of channels reduces the memory usage!
Guy Watson (or FlashGuru as he is also known) has been an active, well
recognized figure in the Flash community for over four years,
supporting the community with tutorials, source files, moderating the
Flashkit forums, and running his own Flash resource Web site,
FlashGuru’s MX 101. Guy was one of two developers who created the ever
popular, award winning zoom interface for Relevare and now runs his
own company, FlashGuru LTD, which builds Flash Games & Applications
for clients such as Comic Relief, Egg and Channel 4.
