Adobe® Flex® 3 Bible

Chapter 12. Managing Application Navigation

In any application that supports more than a single task on a single screen, you need to provide the user with a way of navigating from one area of the application to another. These areas of the application that can be presented only one screen at a time are commonly known as views.

In Flex applications, you handle navigation by switching between the application's views, or by modifying the current state of a view. Unlike classic Web applications, which define views as complete HTML pages that are requested and loaded by the browser one at a time, a Flex application's views are predefined and downloaded as part of the entire application. Unless you're using an advanced architecture such as runtime modules, switching from one view to another doesn't require new requests to a Web server, as it would in a Web site.

In this chapter, I describe how to manage navigation in a Flex application by managing stacks of views.

Note

The term view will be used throughout this chapter to describe a rectangular visual presentation that presents and/or collects information from the user. The term is taken from the application development architecture known as model-view-controller, a way of breaking up an application into small parts with specific functions.

Note

These sites have extensive technical information about the role of views in model-viewcontroller style development:

http://ootips.org/mvc-pattern.html http://c2.com/cgi/wiki? ModelViewControllerAsAnAggregateDesignPattern ...