ok this is one of those things that your initial reaction may well be "Fuck you, go pay someone who knows what they're doing to do it", but I reckon I've paid my dues already

So I've been asked to quote to create a Flash touchscreen quiz that will run on a handful of tablet PCs at some conference thing. The quiz results need to be stored over the course of a few days and reported to the client at the end.

On a webpage this would be easy peasy, but running it across a LAN I'm a bit in the dark.

The one simple-but-shit option I can think of is to dump the data to a SharedObject and use another secret Flash app that the admin can use to read that data out again, dumped into a textfield - copy and paste that somewhere else - repeat that process across all the tablet PCs and then compile the lot together. I did that before on a project like this, but that was just one day and one touchscreen, so it was ok. I think this method is too prone to user-cock-up for this bigger project.

Can someone give me a clue? What are my options here?

oh, I won't have direct access to these PCs to set them up either, so it'll need to be easy to prepare too.

Stinky might be able to help you out as he's used to Flash and linking them together. I still just use Director and have a database on a control PC on the network that all the PC's write their data to via ASP. Good luck

Ha, thanks for rpelying Suzy, I've even just mailed you a panic mail

yeah I'm not worried about the Flash side of it, that much I can work out, it's setting up the network that I don't know about. What do I need to do to be able to make an ASP script on one PC be accessible from another on the same LAN?

actually that much I can probably even Google myself...

Hi, Yeah just got it I think the way we usually do it is overkill for what you need as we also pull information from the control PC to each of the PC's and use the control PC to allow the client to update the content on the PC's as well as sending info from the PC's to the server. We actually set up a webserver so it's exactly like connecting to a website. Sorry I can't be more help. Suzy

that sounds like what I need really - a control PC that is the webhost that has a database on it to store the questionnaire results and handle the reporting at the end of the event, and a bunch of client tablet PCs that show the Flash app that they pull from the web server and they send the data back to the server for storage.

But I know nothing yet about how to set that webserver up! Is that something you can do yourself or is it usually done for you?

We just buy a PC that has windows server on or if it's only a few PC's just set up IIS on a regular PC and we just use gasp an Access database If you do go that route I'll be able to help you out.

It is really easy to set-up an IIS server on a Windows box (requires install CD), or an Apache server on a windows/linux/osx box.

Do you require ASP? Problem being that the IIS server on non-server Windows is limited to a certain number of simultaneous connections (cant recall how many, but it is a very low number)

With XAMPP it is very easy to set up a decent PHP/MySQL site on any machine that can handle any (reasonable) number of connections. Hell, you could code the PHP to write to Access if you want!

And, if you are a classical ASP programmer, PHP is really easy to pick up.

yeah I'm thinking just store the data in a textfile for now, skip the whole database install issue. It's not much data, easy to write to text.

PHP's fine for me, as is ASP classic and .NET. I will need some server side scripting to handle the data coming back from the quiz.

I think my big hurdle now will be setting up this intranet, as I'm in Spain and the comps with be in the UK - I think I'll ahve to get them to let me dial into the PC that will act as server via remote desktop or something similar.

I would go with the Xampp idea myself......BUT.....

it would be a good opportunity to check out your AIR skills too! AIR installs an SQLLite DB that you can write to locally, so each station could have it's own data storage temporarily or you could still set up your master-computer idea too.

I've just finished a project with SQLLite and really got on well with it!