How can I restrict one stream per user?

Question

Hello!
I have made a mp3-streamer in flash. Users must log on to a
web page in order to access my player. If one user logs in once
it's all OK. The problem occurs if a user "share" his account with
multiple others and log in twice (or n-times). Now I have no
control on how many users that can log onto the system.
I'm looking for a solution where for instance the first one
who logs in gets to play the stream, and all others that log into
the same account are refused access to streaming. I'm not a
back-end programmer, so I hope this is something that can be solved
using FMS. Is there a known working solution to this problem or
some features on FMS that can lock streaming to the first user.
I've tried sending in the username, however if user#1 stops
the stream user #2 is able to take over the stream, so now user # 1
is refused the stream.
Trond

Answer 1

FMS does support connections to web services, and can make
http requests in a number of ways. I like to use remoting, but you
can also use loadVars, XML or an XML Socket connection. The best
approach will be dictated by the services you need to connect to.
For remoting, you want to look into netservices.asc , and you can
find some examples/tutorials at flash-db.com
About your scenario
1) Player sends a ticket (SHA or something)
The client (.swf would pass this data to FMS in the
netconnection.connect() argument.
2)FMS runs a remote call and verifies the ticket <-This is
the problem
No problem here. All you need to do is have your FMS app make
the request of the authentication server (based on the token value
provided in the client's connect request) before accepting the
connection. See the docs for application.onConnect()
3a) User already online? (Hmm forgot to turn off your player?)
..disconnect connection and give new connection to same user
Here's the part you'll need some new structure for. You're
going to need to be able to reference other clients that are logged
in under the username of the new client. When a client connects, a
corresponding client is stored in the application's clients[]
array, but it's up to you to add your own variables to each client
object so you have something to reference them by in your
functions. The really cool thing is, once you have a means of
picking the client out of the list, FMS auto-resolves to the client
itself, and you can target the client with other functions.
Take this server side code for example
application.onConnect = function (clientObj, userName){ //
Username was passed in the client connect() argument
clientObj.userName = userName
Now the username is a variable in the client object. To find
a client with a specific user name, you just need to loop through
the application.clients array and look for a match:
function checkForUsername(name){
for (x = 0; x < application.clients.length; x++){
if (application.clients[x] .userName== name){
// match found, do something about it. If we want to dump the
old user, we might do this
application.disconnect(application.clients[x]);
Of course, this is only one approach, but it's about the most
straighforward method I can think of.
In the case of your app, I suggest you send two values to the
FMS app in the client connect() argument... an SHA token, and the
username. You'll use the username for checking user conflicts, and
the SHA to verify the session (this should be a one time thing...
the token expires after a single use)
Hope it helps.