panelMenu as page navigation

[joergvf]

Hi,

I tried to understand how the richfaces-demo does it, but got lost in all those includes and dynamically generated URLs, unfortunately.

My question is: how can I use a rich:panelMenu as a page navigation?

In particular, how can it be achieved that upon clicking on a menuItem, a new page is displayed, while the state of the panelMenu is preserved, i.e. expanded groups keep being expanded?

Thanks for any hints,
Jörg

[joergvf]

I understand now that I have to keep the expanded state of panelMenuGroups in a session-scoped bean. I succeeded to initially get one menuGroup opened by having a managed-bean navigationController with a Map<String,Boolean> property called expandedMenus:

<rich:panelMenuGroup
 expanded="#{navigationController.expandedMenus['transportdaten']}"
 label="Transportdaten">

The above panelMenuGroup will be opened when I display the page. However, I don't succeed in keeping the expanded state that the user selected across menu selections, using the following:

<h:form id="navigationForm">

 <rich:panelMenu style="width:200px" submitMode="none"
 mode="none" iconExpandedGroup="disc" iconCollapsedGroup="disc" iconExpandedTopGroup="chevronUp"
 iconGroupTopPosition="right" iconCollapsedTopGroup="chevronDown" iconCollapsedTopPosition="right">
[..]
 <rich:panelMenuGroup expanded="#{navigationController.expandedMenus['stammdaten']}" label="Stammdaten">
 <rich:panelMenuGroup expanded="#{navigationController.expandedMenus['kraftfahrzeuge']}" label="Kraftfahrzeuge">
 <rich:panelMenuItem id="neuErfassen" name="neuErfassen" label="Neu erfassen"
 action="#{fahrzeugController.createNewFahrzeug}">
 </rich:panelMenuItem>
 <rich:panelMenuItem id="uebersicht" name="uebersicht">
 <h:commandLink action="#{fahrzeugController.fahrzeuge}">Übersicht</h:commandLink>
 </rich:panelMenuItem>
 </rich:panelMenuGroup>
 </rich:panelMenuGroup>
 </rich:panelMenu>
</h:form>

My suspicion is that the expanded attribute values are not submitted correctly, even though I put the panelMenu into a form and tried both a panelMenuItem with action as well as a commandLink. Neither seems to transmit the expanded state.

There is some confusion in the documentation about whether it is "mode" or "submitMode", and I tried both with "none" and "server" ("ajaxx" gives other problems).

Can anybody give a working example for keeping the expanded state across panelMenuItem selections?

[ilya80]

i second that, a working example (and perhaps a bit more simple than richfaces-demo) would be great

[ilya80]

Okay, i was messing around with that and here is the workaround i came up with:

To use partial page navigation with navigation elements located out of navigated content (a.k.a. panelMenu as naviation) i had to create a session scoped bean that was responsible for dishing out "full context-relative path of the resource" for the a4j:include viewId attribute. No navigation rules are used in that approach.

I`m not sure if this is the best way to handle such cases or if it its valid at all. I made the id's in the included pages different to avoid any trouble.

Here is a very silly sample:

---------------- from bean source ----------------

public class ComponentNavigator {

private String currentPagePath;

public ComponentNavigator() {
this.currentPagePath = "components/page1.jspx";
}

public String getCurrentPagePath() {
return currentPagePath;
}

public void viewFirstPage(ActionEvent event) {
currentPagePath = "components/page1.jspx";
}

public void viewSecondPage(ActionEvent event) {
currentPagePath = "components/page2.jspx";
}

}

---------------- from faces-config xml ----------------

<managed-bean>
<managed-bean-name>componentNavigator</managed-bean-name>
<managed-bean-class>demo.ComponentNavigator</managed-bean-class>
<managed-bean-scope>session</managed-bean-scope>

</managed-bean>

---------------- from main.jspx ----------------


<f:view>

<h:form>
<a4j:commandButton value="First Page" actionListener="#{componentNavigator.viewFirstPage}" reRender="insertedpage"/>
<a4j:commandButton value="Second Page" actionListener="#{componentNavigator.viewSecondPage}" reRender="insertedpage"/>
<a4j:include viewId="/WEB-INF/#{componentNavigator.currentPagePath}" id="insertedpage" rendered="true"/>

</h:form>

</f:view>


---------------- from page1.jspx ----------------

<rich:panel header="Simple Echo"
xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
xmlns:a4j="http://richfaces.org/a4j"
xmlns:rich="http://richfaces.org/rich"
id="richpanel1" >

<h:inputText value="#{bean.name}" id="in1">

<a4j:support event="onkeyup" reRender="outtext1" id="sup1"/>

</h:inputText>

<h:outputText id="outtext1" value="OUTTEXT1: #{bean.name}" />

</rich:panel>