Programming Flex 3

Integrating with Browser Buttons and Deep Linking

Web browsers are designed primarily to render HTML content. Traditionally, web sites and web applications were built around the page metaphor whereby each page was a unique HTML file. The implications of this are important because the way in which browsers are designed to navigate the Web is built around the page metaphor. For example, browsers have Back buttons that allow users to navigate to the page they were viewing previously. Additionally, browsers inherently support a concept known as deep linking, which is simply a matter of allowing a user to navigate directly to a URL such as http://www.adobe.com/go/flex. The deep part of the deep link is the path following the domain name (/go/flex).

Users are accustomed to using the Back button and deep linking. These features are such an important part of the web experience that you may even wonder why we’re mentioning them in this chapter. After all, you may think these features are incredibly obvious. However, the new generation of web applications, including Flash, Ajax, and Flex applications, breaks these features. The result is that users of these applications can feel frustrated when they habitually use the Back button or copy and paste a link and these actions don’t work as expected.

Exactly how do these behaviors break in Flex applications? First, consider how the Back button works. The browser maintains a history of pages the user has viewed. When the user clicks the Back button, ...