Flash® Catalyst™ CS5 Bible

Chapter 10. Creating View States

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating new view states

• Changing components in states

• Triggering state changes with interactions

• Setting up transitions

• Using button states

Traditional Web applications rely on a series of pages to display changing information. An e-commerce application, for example, would likely include one or more product pages, a shopping cart display page, one or more checkout pages, and an order summary page. Each of these would be individual, distinct documents.

In contrast, a Flex application is, once published, a single SWF document. The entire application is contained within this single document.

Individual pages are represented by view states. As a designer in Catalyst, you can define these view states, determine which assets appear on them, and set up interactions that allow users to move from one state to the next.

Note

To ease the transition to the Flex framework for designers, Catalyst refers to states as either view states or pages. For the purposes of working in Catalyst and for the purposes of this text either term is interchangeable. The Flex framework, however, only uses the term view states.

Creating New View States

Every new Catalyst project contains a single state which by default is named Page 1. Projects can, however, contain as many states as are needed. States are managed in the Pages/States panel at the top of the screen (see Figure 10.1).

You can create new states either from scratch or as a duplicate of an existing state. Most often, ...