Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 41. System Interactions in Flex

The Flex/Flash platform provides an extremely rich and capable runtime for use in building your applications. When building those applications, you aren't just limited to the traditional scope of a HTML-based web application. You can play audio, display the application in full screen, add system menus, and so on.

When building your rich Flex applications, there a few things to keep in mind. First, not all machines that will be loading your application will be the same. Fortunately, the Flash Player allows you to detect what capabilities are available for you to use on the client machine. Second, you can build your application to take advantage of a cross-platform full-screen layout. This could be helpful in a variety of circumstances, such as kiosk-style applications or media players. Third, you are not just limited to a simple left-click. You can build your application to have custom context menus for any visual object displayed within your Flex application.

This chapter discusses approaches you can use to tailor your applications to the capabilities of the client runtime. We will examine how to detect system capabilities, launch the Flash Player in full-screen, and extend your applications' interactivity using custom context menus.

Detecting Client System Capabilities

Because of the distributed nature of the Internet, your application potentially could be accessed by quite a few machines. An important thing to keep in mind is that not all machines ...