As I continue producing Flex solutions for customers I find more of them reporting the same issue -- that pressing F5 no longer refreshes the page.

The cause of this is that the Flash plugin takes complete keyboard focus. As soon as your mouse focuses on the Flash player all the usual browser keyboard shortcuts stop working. Not that I'd expect a user to know that of course.

This is especially confusing in a hybrid HTML/Flex app like the Staff Skill demo, as shown below:

One of the things I offer as a workaround is that the user clicks "outside the Flex app" to remove focus from Flash and then presses F5. Or that they use the browser's own refresh icon.

I'm never happy with half-hearted answers like that though. There's a bigger picture to address.

In most - if not all - cases the goal of the user is to simply refresh the data in a Grid. There's no need to reload the whole page to do that. Instead we can provide an interface to update the grid itself.

On the image above notice I've highlighted in yellow a "button" that refreshes the grid. The MXML for this button is simply:

<mx:LinkButton label="Refresh" 
        click="xmlGet.send()" 
        icon="@Embed(source='images/refresh.png')"/>

Notice that the click event simply tells the HTTPService with ID "xmlGet" to fetch the data from the same URL it did when the app was first loaded. The HTTPService then handles in the refreshing of the grid. Case closed.

Taking It Further

While a button is better than having to explain the cause and workaround over and over it's not as good as a catch-all solution would be. Ideally what we'd do have Flex listen for a press of the F5 key and then do the same as the above button without the using knowing.

Using key codes you can capture F5 being pressed like so:

private function init():void{
        application.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP, keyHandler);
}
                        
private function keyHandler(event:KeyboardEvent):void {
        if (event.keyCode==116){
                xmlGet.send();
        }
}

Taking it one step further you could detect if the shift or ctrl key are held down and refresh the whole page in that case. Just an idea.

Summary

Even if this hasn't been an issue for you yet, if you're using Flex and grids it probably will be at some point, so it might be an idea to get in there with a pre-emptive strike.