"Tear-off" from online Flash App to offline AIR App

Say you have an interactive, connected, online, Browser-based Flex application that is used for scenario-based analysis. Users of this application need to be able to "tear-off" a scenario and work on it offline in an AIR application. How does one achieve this and re-use the same code written for the online application? The following outlines an approach:

• Online Flash Client requests metadata and data from the server needed to render scenario view

• ActionScript metadata and data objects are delivered to client from Java versions on server using FDS remoting (AMF3 over HTTP)

• Client creates a byte array of these objects in some pre-defined sequence and sends this to the server using URLLoader

• Server writes these bytes into a temporary file on server disk

• Client uses FileReference::download() to download this file to the client machine

Once downloaded, the AIR application (containing the exact same rendering code as the online application) reads this data file to de-serialize the byte arrays as ActionScript metadata and data objects, and renders the scenario view.

Works, but ugly and convoluted! Got an alternative?