Developing Android Applications with Flex 4.5

Chapter 6. OS Interactions

Open in Browser

From within your application, you can open a link using the device’s native browser in the same manner as you would in a traditional browser-based Flex application. This is accomplished with the URLRequest class. Simply creating a new URLRequest and passing it into the navigateToURL method will invoke the user’s browser to handle the request. Figure 6-1 shows the sample application running and Figure 6-2 shows the results of clicking on the Open button:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<s:Application xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009"
                  xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark">

    <fx:Script>
          <![CDATA[
               protectedfunction sendIt_clickHandler(event:MouseEvent):void
               {
                     var s:String = "";
                     s+= address.text;
                     navigateToURL(new URLRequest(s));

               }
          ]]>
    </fx:Script>

    <fx:Declarations>
          <!-- Place non-visual elements (e.g., services, value objects) here -->
    </fx:Declarations>

    <s:Label text="URL" top="40" left="50"/>
    <s:TextInput id="address" top="30" left="160" text="http://www.happytoad.com" 
        width="250"/>
    <s:Button id="sendIt" label="Open" click="sendIt_clickHandler(event)" top="110" 
        left="160"/>
</s:Application>

Figure 6-1. Open a link in a browser

Figure 6-2. Clicking the link launches the browser selector