RealEyes Media

From the previous post you should know how to navigate from 1 view to the next using the ViewNavigator.  Now, you want some data in that view right? No problem, this is where the View object’s ‘data‘ property comes into play. Setting the data property is accomplished by passing the data object, in addition to the View’s class name, into the pushView() method on the navigator object.

Example:

navigator.pushView(MyNewView, dataObject);

This effectively calls the setting for the data property of the new View (MyNewView) object that is created.

Managing View Data

You could work with the data property on the View object directly. For instance, if the data object passed into the View via the pushView() method was a simple user object that contained a name property, you could bind the name property to a label control.

Example:

<s:Label id="name_lbl" text="{data.name}" />

Overriding the Data Property Setter

Usually though, you’d want to override the setter for the data property. Then you can type your object and work with it in a better manner.

Example:

protected var user:User;
override public function set data(value:Object):void
{
 super.data = value;
 user = value as User;
}

<s:Label text="{user.name}" />

So now we’ve got the data in the view. The next step is to manage the state of each view. With mobile apps you can’t count on the view staying around, so we’ll need to keep a tight control on the state of each view. That way we can bring the user right back where they expect to be when they come back to the app after a call for example. In the next post we’ll look into how to do this. Stay tuned.