C H A P T E R 30

Static Breadcrumb

Breadcrumb navigation displays the current page's context within the site structure. It also helps user getting to know the ways in which information has been grouped and allows him to move between these groupings and understand the information structure. Static Breadcrumbs are a type of Breadcrumb where in, a Breadcrumb displayed for the current page does not depend on the user navigation, but depends on the logical grouping of pages, specified by the site developer.

Static Breadcrumb is a View component, that allows the user to drag and drop static breadcrumb components into their web applications. The web application can be mapped to hierarchical collection of breadcrumb items, that can be configured though XML. At run time, this XML will be used as an input for reading the site map structure and depending on the page currently displayed, the bread crumb will be constructed.

For more details on writing this XML, please refer to the DTD and sample XML.

Property Name	Description	Notes
Prefix Text	This property defines the text that will be rendered pre-fixing the Breadcrumb. For example, If Prefix Text property is You are currently here it will be rendered as: You are currently here : Home > Shopping > Men's Section in the browser.
Separator Image	This property defines the separator image to be used between breadcrumb items. Both relative and absolute URL can be specified. In case of relative URL, the location of the image file should be relative to the context root of the application.	If separator image is not specified, then Separator String will be used as a separator.
Separator String	This property defines the separator string to be used between breadcrumb items. For example, If Separator String property is " >> " it will be rendered as You are currently here : Home >> Shopping >> Men's Section in the browser.	The string specified in this property will also be used as an alternate separator when the image can not be rendered by the browser.
Site Map File	This property defines the name of the XML file which has the site map structure. The location of the XML file should be relative to the context root of the application.
Cached Site Map Attribute Name	This property defines the application scope attribute name where the XML DOM Tree is kept. When this is set, site map definition will be read from the DOM tree stored in the attribute specified by this property.