The Dreaded Last Frame

Date: Tue, 9 Jan 1996 08:46:11 -0700
From: Oliver Davies 
Subject: A frequently asked question?

>Can getNetText/NetTextResult be used in a Shockwave movie to "submit"
>some text to a cgi and then receive a text result back?

OK, first time doing a Shockwave project for a client, although experienced in Director 5.

I had an animation that I split into 20 or so files (to simulate streaming) that worked perfectly when accessed from my local hard drive (I was using the command "go movie") but when posted onto our server, it didn't work. I looked around for a solution, bought Magee and Rabinowitz's book, and realised that I should use "goToNetMovie". However, this still didn't work satisfactorily (sometimes worked using Explorer, sent Navigator into fibrilation) and I finally realised what I was doing wrong. I was putting the command into the last frame of the movie which meant that it didn't have time to complete before the end of the launch movie, so I added a few frames and put "go frame -1" in the penultimate frame so that it looped until it had loaded the next movie.

This is a perfect illustration of the difference between normal Lingo commands and asynchronous Lingo - something I had to learn the hard way.