Menu element
A menu element displays metadata and content from content items that match the search criteria of the menu element. The search criteria of a menu element can include matching site areas, authoring templates, categories and keywords.
Creating a menu element
You can only use a menu element by creating a menu component. You cannot add a menu element to authoring templates, site areas or content items.
Menu search options
Menu element search options are defined in the Menu Component Query section of the menu element form. These search options define which content items from your site will be displayed in the menu element. Search options can include a combination of search parameters including searches based on authoring templates, categories and site areas. Menus can search for the following in a Web site:
- Content with matching authoring templates
- Content with matching site areas
- Content with matching categories
- Content with matching keywords
- A combination of these
Menu element searches are "or" searches, not "and" searches.
This means that a menu element that searches for two different categories and an authoring template will return content items profiled with at least one of each profile type (one category and one authoring template), not just content items that match all of the parameters. Content that matches only one profile type (authoring template only or category only) are not returned.
You cannot use taxonomies in menu element searches. To search for content items profiled with any category in a taxonomy, you should create a single top-level category under a taxonomy, and nest all other categories below the top-level category. Select the top-level category in the menu elements search parameters.
Menu sorting options
You can sort menu search results according to following criteria:
- Content item name
- Content item description
- Published date
- Expired date
- General date one
- General date two
- Last modified date
- A combination of these (three at most)
Menu paging options
IBM Lotus Web Content Management provides flexible paging options to enable you to display search results are generated by the menu element.
- You can specify the number of results displayed in a menu page.
For example, a menu defined to show five results per page would display only five records from the set of search results.
- You can indicate where in the results set you want to begin showing results by specifying which menu page to use as a starting point.
As an example, if you are displaying five results per menu page and you want to show records 6–10, you would start showing search results with the second menu page instead of the first.
- To provide easier navigation of the search results in a menu, you can include a page navigation element in the header or the footer of the menu element. The page navigation element enables stepping forward or backward through multiple menu pages without the need for creating multiple menu elements to display the different pages.
- A large number of search results can cause a delay when the menu element is initially rendered. To prevent this delay, you can limit the maximum number of pages of results that are included in the menu.
To further improve the efficiency of the menu, you can also specify how many pages of results should be read beyond the current page, so that paging performance is not affected by rebuilding the menu.
While a page navigation element is a convenient way of displaying and navigating a menu's search results, you can use the menu's paging options to display search results in other ways.
For example, if you wanted to show the results in a 3-column table, you could create three menu elements with the same search criteria and then tailor the paging options of each menu to display different result sets:
Table 1. Example
Menu Results per page Start page Records displayed Menu element 1 5 1 1 to 5 Menu element 2 5 2 6 to 10 Menu element 3 5 3 11 to 15
The three menus could then be referenced within three different cells of a table row in a presentation template.
Parent topic:
Creating links
Related tasks
Use a menu element