Air Installer Copying and or extracting external files

Question

Is there a way to have an air installer copy an external file to the installation directory?  We are using video data in our app and the resulting air application is just far to big (i.e installer will not run on the end users machine).  So I am thinking that perhaps the air installer can install the app then copy any required media/data from external files to the correct directory.
Can this be done?

Answer 1

I have done something similar with a document management app.
Once the app was installed it would check for a DVD / Thumb drive and silently copy all the documents from another drive to the (ASD) AppStorageDirectory.
You could also download your media files to the AppStorageDirectory as well.
When my app gets updated I have a function that deletes obsolete files from the ADS and leave the files I need to persist untouched.
Here is a snippet that reads available drives and looks for a specific named drive and then creates an Array listing all the files which can
then be copied using  SOURCE.copyToAsync(DESTINATION)...
var os:String = Capabilities.os.substr(0, 3).toLowerCase();
         var currentDrives:Array = (os=="mac") ? new File('/Volumes/').getDirectoryListing() : File.getRootDirectories() ;
         var fileList:Array;
         var fileCount:int = 0;
         var fileListArr:Array = new Array();
         for each(var file:File in currentDrives){
             //trace ("Drive: " + file.name + " Size: " + file.size);
             if(file.name.toString().indexOf("KnownNameofDVD")>-1){
                 trace ("Drive: " + file.name + " Size: " + file.size);
                  fileList = (os=="mac") ? new  File('/Volumes/'+file.name).getDirectoryListing() :  new  File(file.name.getDirectoryListing()
                 for(var l:int = 0 ; l<fileList.length; l++){
                     //trace(fileList[l].nativePath)                    
                     fileCount++;
                     fileListArr.push(fileList[l].nativePath.toString())