Coding Guru needed, HELP!

[chuco61]

I work at a local newspaper which is beginning to host news videos with their editorials. The videos are being called in with iframes, the videos are on html pages in a sub folder.

we want to begin putting commercials in the beginning of the videos

THIS IS THE TRICKY PART

We want commercial A to play on news video A on Html A, once Html "A" page has hit 1000 page loads, we would like to disable html A and begin loading html B which will play another video, once this hits 1000 page loads we would like to disable video B and load C and so forth

is there a javascript that can disable a page and load another, maybe in conjunction with an xml list.

Please keep in mind that it is all called into one iframe, wich will relay all these changes.

Please help, thanks!

[Izzmo]

Well, if you don't want to put the commercial into the video, or do a flash/silverlight script which automatically changes the commercial to the video, then you would need to know the exact time of the commercial.

So, what you would do is just a HTTP-META-REFRESH tag on the commercial html page.. after it hits say 30 seconds (if the commercial is 30 seconds), then it will transfer to the video.

If you are assembling this all by XML, which is good, all you need to be able to do is update the XML file with the person who hit it and keep adding the count, from there, you can determine which commercial to go to.

Not possible with Javascript to edit a file on a server, but it is rather easy with Server Side code (ASP.NET, PHP, etc)

[chuco61]

actually the commercial is already rendered before the video so it's one file.

Essentially what im looking for is once html A is loaded 20 times, it disables, then we want html B to load 20 times, then disable and go to the next video and so forth.

so this would require php or asp? or can an xml simply swap this transition out?

we are trying to make this so that our online writer doesnt have to keep track of all the hits and swap it all out

thank you so much for your insight thus far!

[Izzmo]

Right, JavaScript cannot edit files. So, you could do this all via an XML file. You just need to write a simple script back end that will append to this XML file everytime it is reached to update the count on the commercial. So, once it hits 20, the script will see that and then tell the HTML to render the next commercial instead.

[chuco61]

oh great!

any leads to where i might be able to find something like this? which language would handle it better?

im not too well adept with server side languages.

do you know of any simple scripts?

[Izzmo]

PHP is the most lightweight for this kind of situation.

Do you know what your server operating system is? Windows or Linux?

[chuco61]

yes im on a windows back end.

[chuco61]

actually my mistake i have newfirms which is unix. i think its both windows and linux.

[chuco61]

*netfirms

[Izzmo]

So, it probably supports and has PHP compiled and running, correct?

[chuco61]

yes it does support php

[Izzmo]

Okay, then you could write a simple script using the fopen and fwrite commands for XML.. or use the XML functions, whichever.

Do you need an example?

[chuco61]

an example would be great!

ideally this will show through an iframe on our homepage

then it would point to a sub folder of 3 html pages with 3 different videos, each will expire after 20 loads in the list

thank you so much!

[chuco61]

any luck izzmo?

[Izzmo]

Yes, I've been working on this morning

Hopefully you have PHP 5?

[Izzmo]

So, here is a really brief example.

What happens is everytime you access the XML file (with an id attached to it) it will update the hits on that id. So, when you want to access a video, you can pull the url down and also update the hits.

Hopefully this is what you needed!

Here is the XML file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
 <items>
  <item name="1">
   <url>http://www.yoursite.com/videos/com1.wmv</url>
   <hits>19</hits>
  </item>
  <item name="2">
   <url>http://www.yoursite.com/videos/com2.wmv</url>
   <hits>1</hits>
  </item>
  <item name="3">
   <url>http://www.yoursite.com/videos/com3.wmv</url>
   <hits>0</hits>
  </item>
 </items>
</rss>

Here is the PHP file

PHP Code:

<?php
 $fid = (Int)$_GET["id"];
 $element = (String)"";
 $eid = (Int)0;
 $xr = new XMLReader();
    $xr->open("http://www.yoursite.com/feed.xml", "UTF-8");
 $xw = new XMLWriter();
 $xw->openMemory();
 $xw->startDocument("1.0", "UTF-8");
 while($xr->read())
 {
  switch($xr->nodeType)
  {
   case XMLReader::ELEMENT:
    $xw->startElement($xr->name);
    $element = $xr->name;
    $element_string = (String)"";
    if(!$xr->isEmptyElement)
     $element_string = $xr->value;
    if($xr->hasAttributes)
    {
     while($xr->moveToNextAttribute())
     {
      if($xr->name == "name")
       $eid = $xr->value;
      $xw->writeAttribute($xr->name, $xr->value);
     }
    }
    $xw->text($element_string);
    break;
   case XMLReader::TEXT:
   
   case XMLReader::CDATA:
    if($fid == $eid && $element == "hits")
     $xw->text($xr->value + 1);
    else
     $xw->text($xr->value);
    break;
   case XMLReader::SIGNIFICANT_WHITESPACE:
   case XMLReader::WHITESPACE:
    $xw->text($xr->value);
    break;
   case XMLReader::END_ELEMENT:
    $xw->endElement();
    break;
  }
 }
 $xw->endDocument();
 Header("application/xml");
 $handle = fopen("feed.xml", "w");
 fwrite($handle, $xw->outputMemory(true));
 fclose($handle);
?>

[chuco61]

WOW thank you.

Im sorry but how would i implement this? I go server side with my html iframe page, my php document and my videos. is it then working from there.

thanks again for your time and efforts!

[Izzmo]

That's just an example, not a pure implementation for you. You would have to tweak it.

But essentially, figure out what you need to pull out from the XML sheet (and populate it before hand) and then use that script to update it.