Loading Dynamic Updates to Leaderboard

[Claunchster]

I'm an intermediate school teacher and still fairly new to AS3.  My students have an ongoing keyboarding contest amongst the classes. So I have their keyboarding data in a spreadsheet that gets updated daily. I want to be able to pull the top 3 scores and names to create a type of Leaderboard and load them dynamically each day to my wesbite as an update instead of having to update my site manually each day. Is there a way for me to do this with AS3?

[sinious]

AS3 can't read spreadsheets. Being you already need to upload the spreadsheet to a site anyhow, what you can do is save a CSV (comma separated value) version of it to your site and flash can read that file (it's just text). There are some tools out there which can read an actual say, excel spreadsheet, and convert it into something else. I think that's excessive and complex as a solution though.

Try saving your file (Usually file->export or file->save as) as a CSV file. Take a look at the format of it. Read it into your flash app via the URLLoader class and parse the string data. You'll probably find yourself using the String's split() function to break your data up via spaces, commas, newlines (\n), etc, and it should be pretty easy to work with.

You might want to consider making the document a google document which would let you have direct access to the data in CSV format without needing to update a CSV file on your website manually. More information here on doing that.