ASP Programming
 
Forums: » Register « |  User CP |  Games |  Calendar |  Members |  FAQs |  Sitemap |  Support | 
User Name:
Password:
Remember me

The Shed is going Social! Join us on FaceBook and Twitter and chime in on the conversation.

Go Back   Dev Shed ForumsProgramming Languages - MoreASP Programming

Reply
Add This Thread To:
  Del.icio.us   Digg   Google   Spurl   Blink   Furl   Simpy   Y! MyWeb 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Rate Thread Display Modes
 
Unread Dev Shed Forums Sponsor:
  #1  
Old May 14th, 2003, 11:55 AM
bramsey bramsey is offline
Contributing User
Dev Shed Newbie (0 - 499 posts)
 
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: USA
Posts: 226 bramsey User rank is Just a Lowly Private (1 - 20 Reputation Level) 
Time spent in forums: 2 h 40 m 35 sec
Reputation Power: 13
site navigation

I am looking for opinions on this question. I have a huge site built for a large corporation. It has hundreds and hundreds of pages. I am looking for an easy way to implement a navigation scheme that will be easy to maintain. I don't want to have to go to every page that a link resides to change the link.

I have come up with two ways to do this. I don't know if these are the best solutions.

1. Run the navigation through a database. The database would have to have a table for primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary nav. It would probably have to call to the database four times. Once for each level of navigatoin and display based on relationships between tables. The relationships would be established with id numbers. This could be problematic because "at" and "off" conditions of the navigation would be driven based on the id variables passed through the querystring. If someone just entered a url manually without the variables attached, they could get a page where the navigation does not display correctly.

2. Use an array to store the navgation. The problem that I can see with this is that I would have to loop through the array several times to display the different levels of navigation based on relationships between elements in the array.

Is there a better way to do this? Am I way off here? I just want something easy to maintain and that will work no matter what the user does.

Thanks for sharing.

Reply With Quote
  #2  
Old May 15th, 2003, 09:20 PM
ngibsonau ngibsonau is offline
Contributing User
Dev Shed Newbie (0 - 499 posts)
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Posts: 138 ngibsonau User rank is Just a Lowly Private (1 - 20 Reputation Level) 
Time spent in forums: < 1 sec
Reputation Power: 11
I think your looking for a silver bullet.

Silver bullets do exist but rarely kill ware wolves because they may be silver but they are not magic!

If you find the answer to your problem you'll be rich!

The only real suggestion I can make that will help (without using too much brain power and time) is to suggest you investigate URL rewriting. The appache webserver has a mod call url_rewrite or something that allows you to convert your internal ugly url with query string parameters from

http://www.mysite.com/pagex.asp?section=7&page=6&item=5

into

http://www.mysite.com/accounting/intro/index.htm

Then you never have to have the user sumitting page=-1 and getting an error because they dont know that page=x is valid.

There are some ActiveX components that allow the same thing for the IIS and ASP

You could also generate you html at design time from a database and server static html instead of serving dynamic database driven html.

Thats my 2 cents worth.
__________________
--

ngibsonau

Reply With Quote
  #3  
Old May 16th, 2003, 08:40 AM
bramsey bramsey is offline
Contributing User
Dev Shed Newbie (0 - 499 posts)
 
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: USA
Posts: 226 bramsey User rank is Just a Lowly Private (1 - 20 Reputation Level) 
Time spent in forums: 2 h 40 m 35 sec
Reputation Power: 13
solution

Thanks for the input. Here is what I have decided to do. I am going to run the navigation out of a database:

link level1 level2 level3 section

primarylink1 1 0 0 aboutus
primarylink2 2 0 0 aboutus
secondarylink 2 1 0 aboutus

I can pull stuff out of the database by section and sort by level1, level2, level3. I can check the link with Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME") to see if they are the same. If they are, I will have my at condition. If they aren't it will show up in the off condition.

I will have to build an admin tool to add, modify and delete navigation links. If I add a link that goes between two existing links in the order of things, I will bump up the the sort number for the links that go after it and insert the new link.

That should take care of what I am looking to do. This site has hundereds of pages. I am sick of having to modify 20-30 pages at a time when they decide to add a link. This should make things easy.

Reply With Quote
Reply

Viewing: Dev Shed ForumsProgramming Languages - MoreASP Programming > site navigation

Developer Shed Advertisers and Affiliates



Thread Tools  Search this Thread 
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes  Rate This Thread 
Rate This Thread:


Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
View Your Warnings | New Posts | Latest News | Latest Threads | Shoutbox
Forum Jump

Forums: » Register « |  User CP |  Games |  Calendar |  Members |  FAQs |  Sitemap |  Support | 
  
 


Powered by: vBulletin Version 3.0.5
Copyright ©2000 - 2013, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.

© 2003-2013 by Developer Shed. All rights reserved. DS Cluster - Follow our Sitemap