Lesson 15. Using the History Manager

What You Will Learn

In this lesson, you will:

• Use standard history management

• Import the HistoryManagement classes

• Build a custom HistoryManager class for the CategoryView component

Approximate Time

This lesson takes approximately 45 minutes to complete.

Lesson Files

Media Files:

None

Starting Files:

Lesson15/start/as/ecomm.as

Lesson15/start/DataEntry.mxml

Lesson15/start/views/ecomm/CategoryView.mxml

Completed Files:

Lesson15/complete/as/ecomm.as

Lesson15/complete/views/ecomm/CategoryView.mxml

An important part of most rich Internet applications (RIAs) is the capability to use the back and forward buttons in the browser. Most users of RIAs are accustomed to navigating through web pages by using these buttons, and it makes sense to implement the same functionality in your Flex applications.

The navigational components that you learned about in the Lesson 13, "Implementing Navigation," have this functionality automatically built inincluding the Accordion, TabNavigator, and TabBar containersand components that descend from the ViewStack container. You can also add this functionality to your own components by using the HistoryManager class. In this lesson, you will enable the back and forward buttons in the FlexGrocer application using the HistoryManager class in a custom component.

The FlexGrocer application with the back and forward buttons working within the browser