RE: CrumbsTag idea

Hey Aron,

Sounds interesting.  Unfortunately, at this point, I have little to do
with StrutsMenu.  I just don't' have the time.  Matt has been the one
heading things up recently.  I'll copy you to the user list as well.

Thanks,

Scott


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Aron Gombas [mailto:[email protected]] 
> Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2005 3:51 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: CrumbsTag idea
> 
> 
>  Hi Scott!
> 
>  First, sorry for my poor English.
>  We're using the struts-menu package in a current project, 
> and I had the 
> idea that I'd use it also for generating a "crumbs control", because 
> both the title keys and the URL's are available in 
> menu-config.xml, and 
> I don't really need anything else for the crumbs.
> 
>  First, I thought I'd use the VelocityMenuDisplayer with some tricky 
> macros to render my menu to a format like "link1 > link2 > 
> link3", but 
> then I had to realize that I can't pass in an arbitrary list 
> of links to 
> the existing DisplayMenuTag, I can pass only a menu.  
>  So I had the choice to: 
>  a - create a dummy menu to each page (each configuration of 
> links) and 
> render it with Velocity 
> b - implement a separate tag which would receive the list of links as 
> attrib and use the MenuRepository object from the session-scope
> 
>  I decided to do b, to have the following syntax (as you see 
> I needed to 
> support EL):
> 
>  ...
>  <wasp:crumbs links="menu.home, menu.domains, 
> buildingStructureTypeList. title, ${titleKey}"/>  
>  ...
> 
>  The tag class evaluates and breaks up the "links" attib, and 
> builds the 
> HTML from the localized resource strings plus the URL's generated by 
> struts-menu.  
>  Not a big deal, but works perfectly and hyper-lightweight, 
> and you can 
> actually improve it to a real general tag:
> - now the formatstrings are just hard-wired to the .java, but you can 
> easily externalize them to some .properties file (as I plan 
> to do that 
> later)
> - also, getting the resources is Struts-dependent, so you 
> might want to 
> make changes in order to make it framework-independent
> - adding extra attribs like e.g. "class" to make it look more 
> standard 
> is also a good idea
> 
>  It's really just half-made, not more than an idea.
>  I thought you might be interested in this. Plz ignore my 
> todo-tags in 
> Hungarian. ;) 
>  Thanks for reading.
> 
>  Aron Gombas
>  3NF Corporation
>  www.3nf.com
> 
>  PS. I'm not subscribed to the devel-list, so plz write me 
> directly if 
> you needed to communicate with me.
> 
> 



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