Portal Express, Version 6.0
Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux, Windows
Work with portal navigation
This topic describes how to implement navigation in a portal theme. Before reading this topic, you should be familiar with...
- portal structure
- Page Customize
- Managing Pages portlet
The theme that is shipped with WebSphere Portal provides buttons (for example, Main Menu) and other navigational aids to let you access various screens (for example, Login and Administration). The theme also provides navigation to nodes in the portal hierarchy of the home page, breadcrumb trails, and Quick Links.
Quick Links can be used to access major areas of a portal site. Quick Links are also accessible from any location within the site, and you can customize them for the portal. Quick Links are displayed at the bottom of the site and can be customized as well as provide one-click access to major areas of the site.
In conjunction with the theme, the theme policy assigned to a page either through the Page Context Menu’s Edit Page Properties, Managing Pages’ Edit Page Properties or the XML configuration interface is used to help control the display. Depending on a page’s theme policy, some of these items will or will not be displayed. Theme Policy will also control if page links will be located on the top of the page, and/or on the side of a page
The nodes in this hierarchy can be described by the number of levels below the content root in which they are placed. After installation, the portal theme along with the theme policy control how these nodes are displayed.
The following JSPF files handle navigation within the portal:
- banner_crumbtrail.jspf – Uses the selection model API. Provides a quick way to move back to previous selected nodes. The rendering of the breadcrumb trail is controlled by the theme policy value renderBreadCrumb.
The number of trails listed is controlled by the theme policy value breadCrumbMaxLevels.
- footer.jspf – Controls the quick links. Initial OOB links are provided. The rendering of quick links is controlled by the theme policy value renderFavorites.
- mainmenu.jspf – Handles the main menu. The rendering of the main menu is controlled by the theme policy value renderMainMenu.
The nodes listed are based on the theme policy values rootNavigationStartLevel and rootNavigationStopLevel.
- sideNav.jspf - Displays page links at the side of the site. The nodes displayed are controlled by the theme policy value topNavigationStartLevel and topNavigationStopLevel.
- topNav.jspf – Displays page links at the top of the site. The nodes displayed are controlled by the theme policy value topNavigationStartLevel and topNavigationStopLevel.
Navigation levels are designated by the startLevel and stopLevel attributes of the <portal-navigation:navigation/> tag. The JSPFs that are provided by WebSphere Portal Express do not provide access to all level 1 nodes. Therefore, nodes that are created directly under content root cannot be accessed unless a direct link is created using the <portal-navigation: URLGeneration/> tag.
The following topics provide further details and sample code for providing portal navigation.
- Implementing a single level of navigation
- Implementing side navigation
- Creating custom links to portlets and pages
The <portal-navigation:navigation/> tag is used to create the navigation menu. The content of this tag includes internal Java scriptlets that should not be modified. You can, however, customize the navigation by changing images, HTML and JSP tags, and the classes in themeStyles.jspf.
- Implementing a single level of navigation
- Implementing side navigation
- Creating custom links to portlets and pages
URLs encode navigational state information about WebSphere Portal Express (for example, the user's currently selected page) and about the portlets on a page (for example, the window state of the portlet) in a serialized form. Encoding navigational state information in the URL is used by the portal server to support use of the browser's back button.