Page History

Currently on isda-cs2 there is a Web Project called NavigationFrameworkTest which has a draft version of the navigation framework running on it.  Here's a link to a preview of the site index page in my sandbox: http://jcalz.navtest.www--sandbox.18-92-1-223.ip.alfrescodemo.net:8180/sitetree.jsp

How the Navigation Framework works:

There is a "navigation.jar" file which must live in the /WEB-INF/lib directory of the webapp.  It defines a JSP tag library which can be used to get navigation/breadcrumb/sitetree information.  This library causes the webapp to crawl its structure constantly in the background (on a low priority thread).  The webapp periodically updates a global "SiteTree" object representing all the navigation information about the site.  

For Content Authors:

The web application automatically generates navigation information for your web project.  If you do not tell it to do something differently, it will generate default titles for the sections and pages in your site.  By default, every folder (except META-INF and WEB-INF) in the site will be a Section whose title is the same as the name of the folder.  Also, every file (*note to self: probably should make this just .html, .htm, .xhtml, .jsp, or .jspx files) in the site will be a Page whose title is the same as the name of the file (without the extension).  In some cases this will be what you want.  In other cases, you will want to alter the default behavior by controlling the navigation information yourself.

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That's all there is to it for content authors. 

For Webapp Developers:

Webapp developers will primarily deal with the navigation framework JSP tags and the beans they expose. 

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<%@taglib uri="http://web.mit.edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/ist/isda/tags/navigation" prefix="nav" %>

Tag descriptions:

The following section describes all the tags in the navigation tag library.

<nav:setSiteTreeVar> 

 This <nav:setSiteTreeVar> action sets a scoped variable to the object representing the site tree.  The site tree bean is useful for a JSP which generates a Site Index or Site Map page.  Once you have set a variable to the site tree bean, you can walk through it with the <nav:treeWalk> and <nav:subTreeWalk> tags.

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<nav:setSiteTreeVar var="theSiteTree" />
The Site Tree was last updated at <fmt:formatDate value="${theSiteTree.lastUpdated}" pattern="h:mm:ss a" />

<nav:treeWalk> and <nav:subtreeWalk>

The <nav:treeWalk> and <nav:subtreeWalk> actions allow you to recursively walk through the site tree (or any tree structure). The idea is that the body of the <nav:treeWalk> tag is performed for every branch of the tree. The body of the <nav:treeWalk> tag must contain the <nav:subtreeWalk> tag, which indicates where to include the sub-branches in the tree walk. It's much easier to look at an example than to explain what I mean.

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<nav:setSiteTreeVar var="theSiteTree" />
<h3><ul><li>
  <nav:treeWalk root="${theSiteTree.homeSection}" var="page">
     <a href="${page.url}"         ><c:out value="${page.title}" /></a>:<br/>
       <ul><c:forEach items="${page.subpages}" var="subpage">
         <li><nav:subtreeWalk subroot="${subpage}" /></li>
       </c:forEach></ul>
  </nav:treeWalk>
</li></ul></h3>

<nav:setBreadcrumbVar> 

 This <nav:setBreadcrumbVar> action sets a scoped variable to an object representing the breadcrumb for a particular target url in the site.   In this case, the breadcrumb object is a list of the target's ancestor pages, starting from the home page of the site and ending at the target page.  This is useful for a JSP which generates a breadcrumb for the current page.   Once you have set a variable to a breadcrumb object, you can iterate through it within a <c:forEach> tag.

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<nav:setBreadcrumbVar var="breadcrumb" />
<c:forEach var="page" items="${breadcrumb}" varStatus="status">
<c:if test="${not status.first}">&gt;</c:if><a href="${page.url}"      ><c:out value="${page.title}" /></a>
</c:forEach>

<nav:setPageVar> 

 This <nav:setPageVar> action sets a scoped variable to an object representing the navigation information for a particular target url in the site.   This is useful for a JSP which needs to know, for example, the list of links for the current page or section.  

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<nav:setPageVar var="page"/>
<c:forEach var="subpage" items="${page.subpages}" >
&bull; <a href="${subpage.url}"      ><c:out value="${subpage.title}" /></a><br/>
</c:forEach>

Navigation objects and properties

This section details the various object beans which can be exposed through the above tags.  Unless stated otherwise, these objects are in the edu.mit.isda.navigation package.  Also, all properties of these objects are read-only.  You cannot alter them in any way within a JSP.

SiteTree

This is an object representing the site tree.  There is really only one important property here: homeSection, which corresponds to the topmost url (usually "/") in the site.

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