Mini Navigation Woe!

6 posts by 2 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: May 17, 2012   (RSS)

By Perchpole - May 15, 2012

It seems like I've been tackling this issue for ages but I just can't crack it.

I want to create a mini navigation menu that can be dropped into category pages to help users move back and forth between related pages.


Take a look at this category tree...

Home

About

Reviews
- Films
- Comedy
- Drama
- Sci-Fi
- Fantasy
- Books
- Crime
- Thrillers
- Horror
- Romance

Contact

What I want to do is place a mini menu in the margin of the "Films" page and on all of the pages beneath it in the hierarchy. The resulting menu would look like this:

Films
Comedy
Drama
Sci-fi
Fantasy

NB: The pages use the same template so the code which creates the menu must be applicable to all categories.

I thought it should be easy to create this simply by looping through all of the categories and then filtering through the results with if(): statements and _isSelected, _isParentSelected, _isSibblingSelected, etc...

However, this approach is proving fiendishly difficult to pull off cleanly because the relationship changes depending on which page of the hierarchy you select!

What I would like to do is come up with a solution in which I designate the category at the top of the hierarchy and then filter out the categories from that point down.

So, in my example, I would designate the "Films" category as the root of the mini menu. This tells CMSB where to start from - but how do I compile the rest of the menu?

It's not as straight-forward as it may at first appear!

:0/

Perch

Re: [Perchpole] Mini Navigation Woe!

By robin - May 15, 2012

Hey Perch,

If you set Films as your root category, it should just display what you've added in red. You have a different result? What does your getCategories call look like?

Thanks,
Robin
Robin
Programmer
interactivetools.com

Re: [robin] Mini Navigation Woe!

By Perchpole - May 15, 2012

Hi, Robin -

Thanks for your help.

I'm using a general getCategories call - which grabs every category. I need this for the main navigation system which is at the top of every page.

What I'm trying to do is (somehow) filter those results - further down the page - to return just those required for the mini nav.

It can be done (with a battery of if(): statements) but it gets horribly clunky!

As I said in my original post, I'm relying on a host of _IsSibblingSelected, _isAncestor, etc, etc, calls - but I suspect I'm not making best use of the ['breadcrumb'] and ['_lineage'] options.

:0)

Perch

Re: [Perchpole] Mini Navigation Woe!

By robin - May 15, 2012

The "rootCategoryNum" parameter might be exactly what you need. Just use the num of "Films" instead of 0

e.g:

list($categoryRecords, $selectedCategory) = getCategories(array(
'tableName' => 'category',
'rootCategoryNum' => '0', // Only categories _below_ this one will be shown (defaults to 0 for all)

Hope that helps,
Robin
Robin
Programmer
interactivetools.com

Re: [robin] Mini Navigation Woe!

By Perchpole - May 15, 2012

OK, but I don't want to enter the Film num manually. I want to pass the value with some code. That way it will work on any page.

Lets assume I set up a checkbox on the category editor called "root". I would activate this for the "Films" category.

So, now if the page being viewed is the Films page I can use something like this to pass the value to the code:
<?php if ($selectedCategory['root']): ?>
...
'rootCategoryNum' => $selectedCategory['num']
...
etc

However, if the current page is a sub-category page - like the "Comedy" category - how do I look back up the hierarchy and assign the parent num to 'rootCategoryNum' ?

:0/

Perch