I'm very excited about Flex2 and am moving my previous Flash projects into it. Using skinned components, etc, has really been a joy, but I'm running into an architecture problem that I'd like to get some input on.
The basic framework of my application is working well, it has control bars, some panels and such where server interactions, and data storage, etc is handled... all this stuff works well, and translates well to Flex's "no timeline needed" metaphor. However, one of the main panels will be used to display the actual content... imagine that this is like a custom "acrobat reader" (styled) application. The content will not be PDF, but instead native Flash media types. Flex components, images, swfs, flvs, text, etc. Until the release of Apollo. I need to make this work within the context of Flex. The content will probably all exist at authoring time, so it can be laid-out and preprogrammed and doesn't *have* to be dynamic, though that would be fine too. So let's say I have 8 "chapters" of content, and maybe a total of 100 "pages" of "media"... currently I have a subclass of the panel component wrapping it, and a subclass of viewstack set up to contain it... these have some actionscript tied in so that they communicate with each other, etc. I'm finding that in Flex, the business and UI of an application is easy and fast, while the content is more difficult to produce, populate and manage. So the real question... one viewstack? One for each "chapter"? And if so, is the appropriate architecture to use states in the panel which reference the addition and deletion of multiple viewstacks, or add and delete them via actionscript? If using states, is there a recommended technique for having a project which includes a number of states? My experiments so far says that Flex gets a bit funky surrounding states. Mostly looking for some thoughts on how people would create a project in Flex which includes a lot of (interactive) content. TIA. -- Troy RPSystems, Ltd. www.rpsystems.net
