Navigation in Flex – Understanding the basics

Navigation plays a leading role in all applications. The more you study navigation techniques the more you will understand that navigation is at the core/heart of a any application – the better the navigational system the more unique the user experience.

Navigation in the flex environment is not too difficult and starts with Navigation containers. A subclass of Flex containers is represented by the Navigational container. The benefits of this type of container is that it allows you to navigate and move around the application. Different elements of the user interface are revealed according to the path that the user chooses.

These are some of the Navigator containers in Flex:

• ViewStack
• Accordian
• LinkBar
• MenuBar
• ButtonBar
• TabBar
• TabBarNavigator
• ToggleButtonNavigator

What important to understand is that the above listed containers allow you to control the interactions that the user makes in the application. Secondly and just as important is that you can program the components of the application in response to user interactions.

Continued with an example in flex…


Lets take and example of a ViewStack Navigator container, which is at the core of the Navigator containers. This specific container allows you to specify a selection of child containers that are arranged one on top of the other. The container with the focus will be visible while the others reamain nonactive. The ViewStack container is linked to other Navigator components, easily allowing the user to switch from one child to the other.

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