Detecting The Presence Of Proxy Servers; Chaining Edge Servers - MACROMEDIA FLASH MEDIA SERVER 2-USING FLASH MEDIA SERVER EDGE SERVERS Use Manual

Detecting the presence of proxy servers

Flash Player 8 automatically detects any edge servers in its proximity. When an edge server is
available, Flash Player automatically routes the connection from the client to the origin server
through the proxy server. These edge servers are defined as implicit proxies since the client is
generally unaware that its communication with Flash Media Server is being routed through a
proxy. This use of an implicit proxy allows your current applications to continue working
without any changes. Flash Player exposes the proxy information to the client only through
the read-only properties on the NetConnection object.
For more information on the NetConnection class, see the Client-Side Media ActionScript
Language Reference.
Earlier versions of Flash Player cannot automatically detect edge servers in their
proximity.

Chaining edge servers

You can chain together any number of edges when you make connections to the origin server.
The following URI shows how two explicit proxies are chained together to direct connection
requests to the origin server:
rtmp://proxy1/?rtmp://proxy2/?rtmp://origin/app/inst
When you use URL decoration to chain proxies, Flash Player 7 and earlier versions may have
problems with shared objects because of the embedded question mark (?) character in the
URL.
A workaround is available for clients who use earlier versions of Flash Player. You can resolve
the problem by using the following function to escape the question marks from the URI
before passing the URI to the shared object.
function escapeURI(uri) {
index = uri.indexOf('?');
if (index == -1) return uri;
prefix = uri.substring(0, index);
uri = uri.substring(index);
return prefix += escape(uri);
}
You call this function on the URI you are about to pass into the shared object, then use the
result of the function instead of the original URI. Flash Player 8 resolves this problem for
Flash Media Server.
Introducing edge servers 13