ok, I'm joking a bit about the best navigation ever, but I do have a question about which control all of you experts out there would extend and thoughts on the best way to approach developing this.
Here is a more detailed breakdown of what I'm trying to do: I'm trying to develop a component that integrates the functionality of the tree control with the scrollable menu component Doug Mccune did. Essentially, I'd like a build a menu that is recursive like a tree/menu but when opening a branch that contains more children than can be displayed in the available space, a control like Doug Mccune's scrollable menu (http://flexlib.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/examples/ScrollableMenus/ScrollableMenu_Sample.swf) would appear. This would give the user the ability to navigate to all nodes by either hovering over the "down arrow" or via detecting the mouse position. The main difference between the control I would like to build and the scrollable menu is that I don't want to popUp the child menu but rather, move the next parent node(s) down as far as possible in the available space, and scroll the "leaf" nodes via mouse position or up/down arrows on a layer below the parent displayObjects. Unlike the Tree control which displays a scrollbar for the entire tree, the component I'd like to develop, would only scroll the level of nodes the user is interacting with. I could possibly do something similar by cascading containers and lists, but that seems aweful ugly to me and having a control like this wrapped up into a nice tidy component would pretty sweet. Here's an example of a component I wrote for AS2 which shows the general functionality I'd pretty much like to recreate. This component goes bottom-up, but has a flag to switch to top-down which I'd like to add at some point, but top-down would be fine as a starting point! This version does not show the scrolling feature, so I hope my above description makes sense. http://www.useflashmore.com/accordion-menu-example/ I've tried a few different approaches trying to extend the List, BaseList, Accordion, Tree and none seem all that great and all seem to present their own roadblocks. I'd love to get some feedback from some folks that are much more talented than myself. I promise to post the source when I'm done! :)
