Flex: doing useful things while the transition effect is played

Question

We have a Flex application which has several 'pages' worth of content. Each time a page is opened by the user some of the information on the page needs to be refreshed (takes less than a second to do so). We currently display a 'loading' animation. The idea is to replace it with some kind of transition effect for the whole page and load the content in background while the transition is in progress.

Is it possible? Is it a good idea? Could someone share a link to a good example or article on the subject?

thank you very much

Answer 1

Sounds interesting, but you might have some users loading the content faster than others. For this to work you might need to synch the two ( loading and the transition ), so maybe do a speed test initially and once you know bytesTotal you can use that to estimate the duration for your transition. If the content you add in deosn't do much ( it's just an image or something static ) and there isn't anything that needs to init, that should be ok-ish.

Answer 2

You can use something like this for the spinner. Not sure if that's part of your problem or not.

Otherwise, for your main pages, all you need to do is set myPage.visible=false while you're loading it. Once you get the FlexEvent.CREATION_COMPLETE event, you can set it back to visible=true. Even if visibility is false, the includeInLayout should still be true, which means the component will load correctly.

To make the spinner easier to show, you might need a canvas as the parent. Attach your spinner to that canvas, and your real page will be a child of the parent.