K this probably has a very simple ‘no’ answer and I wasted an incredible amount of hours on it but here goes.

I have 2 templates.
Template 1  is a category template with flash embedded in it for a gallery.
Template 2  is an XML template that lists categories and images from the gallery module. This is called from the flash file in the embed code itself.

There are multiple categories for the gallery. So when I load Template 1 I have a URL ending in C#  e.g.(...gallery/C8/)
My XML contains a query

Now so, this is all fine if I want to list all the subcategories of the parent category which has the id of ‘9’ which you can see in my query there.
BUT I want that ‘9’ to reflect my C# on the category page so the XML loads the correct data for the category page it is on.

Any suggestions for passing that variable at page load time to the xml?

You could use php to strip off the first character:

Then echo it back in your query- php parsed on input.

And it might be possible to use a category heading tag- though I’m a little fuzzy on exactly what you’re doing.

In my gallery I have Main Categories and Sub Categories
Pictures are only going to be added to the sub categories

I am using SlideShowPro to view this gallery.

On my gallery category page I have the flash file embedded.
I also have a drop-down menu with a list of the main categories so when you click one you goto another main category page. On these pages I want the sub categories loaded into the flash gallery.

I can do all this except pass the cat_id or segment_3 of the current Main Category page into the xml file template I use to list my subcategory entries.

So the code you provided is fine and it supplies me with the category id I need. But it is no good to me on the gallery template. I want it to be passed to the xml template and plonked into the query you can see above to replace the ‘9’

Hope that makes more sense. I can PM you the templates if you have the time, Thanks again

Woohoo I have succeeded in achieving this.

On my gallery category page I passed the {segment_3} through the flash embed code using

then in my XML I called this id using

I did turn my XML template into a php template and generated the XML in that.

Thanks for your help. When I have the site live I can direct you to it and this post might make sense to people

Hello there - would you be able to post some of your sample code as I am looking to do something like this and am slightly confused by your extracting the segment_3 variable from the flash embed code - do you add it as a query string onto the end of the .swf part ie something.swf?album_id={segment_3}
?

Thank you!

This tutorial I wrote might expand a bit more as the method gathered speed after that this thread.

If that still does not achieve your goals then post back with some more specifics

Just want to say thank you for the tutorial. It works great as what I need it.