Integrating Flex & PHP - An Introductory Tutorial

First, as this PHP script returns XML data, it must send out the proper Content-type header:
header("Content-type: text/xml");

Then the PHP script prints the root XML element, which can have any name:

echo "<departments>\n";

Finally, the script selects every department from the database and prints each out as a record:

echo "<department>
    <id>{$row['department_id']}</id>
    <name>{$row['department']}</name>
</department>\n";

Make note of the labels given to the elements, as they’ll be referred to in Flex. (Also, I’m using the Improved MySQL extensions, which assumes you’re using PHP 5 and MySQL 4.1 or greater; if not, change the code to the older MySQL functions.)

Viewing the Employees
The Flash application contains a DataGrid that lists every employee (see the next image). This is done using another PHP script that also sends out XML, just like departments_xml.php. This script is called employees_xml.php, and it works just like the previous script. The query here does use a join to also retrieve each employee’s department name. The outputted XML record for each employee is created by these lines:

echo "<employee>
    <first_name>{$row['first_name']}</first_name>
    <last_name>{$row['last_name']}</last_name>
    <department>{$row['department']}</department>
</employee>\n";

Again, note the specific element names.