Problems with HTML within XML

Around a month ago, I promised more fun and exciting posts about passing XML through ExternalInterface from Authorware to be used within Flex. The specific task I was trying to accomplish is taking a series of xml nodes and displaying their contents on screen using a repeater control. The contents could be images, text, or swfs.

The problem I had was with the text. It seems that Flex is very persnickety about its XML formatting, so each XML node must be indented and on a new line. This is fine for ordinary XML, since who cares how it looks to Flex, but when you have line breaks and tabs added around your <b > tags, that is a problem!

The irritating thing is that the problem occurs not once, but twice! The first time is when the XML gets passed through ExternalInterface. I did eventually find a way to defeat that one, but since it also happens again when you pass the string to the XML() object to make the data source for the repeater, that didn't help much. Flex essentially ignores CDATA tags put into the XML nodes and formats the data anyway, so that didn't help either.

What I eventually wound up doing is replacing the "<" characters in embedded html with "^", then replacing that in the final step before rendering. I'm thinking now that I probably also could have gone with a separate text file for each bit of HTML text and told the Flex file to read that in and display it. However, at the time I didn't know how to get a non-air Flex file to read directly from the hard drive, so it didn't occur to me.

Updated September 18, 2008:
I think this was caused by the prettyPrinting and prettyIndent settings on the global XML object itself. I think that if I'd set prettyPrinting to false, I could have avoided the hassle. One day I may even revisit that component...I'll let you know how it turns out.