Flash® Builder™ 4 and Flex® 4 Bible

Chapter 16. Managing Application Navigation

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding classic Web navigation

• Understanding Flex navigation

• Using the ViewStack container

• Navigating with ActionScript

• Using navigator bar containers

• Using menu controls

• Using other navigator containers

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. The 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 pplication by managing stacks of views.

Note

I use the term view 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. ...