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  • Jim Aderhold avatar

    Posted on Oct 20, 2005 (permalink)

    I have found a limitation to the Sitfinity site that has to do with navigation. The problem is that we keep finding a need to have a page on the site go to an external source.

    We have come across this problem on almost every site we have built with Sitefinity. The need to have a page link to an outside page, or a file within the site. What we have to do now is to create a page through Sitefinity, and then go into the code for the navigation and hard path the link for this page. My suggestion would be to have another flag on the page for "External Link" and then another field to put the path of the link. This way if you wanted the page to go to a page on another site, you could simply add the link to the "Page Administration" section on the fly. You could also specify a file that resides on the server. Such as a PDF.

    If this is something you have come across and is already in v2.0 or already in the works, then I am eagerly waiting. Otherwise, I hope you could add this to a future release.

    Thanks

    Reply

  • Chris Chris admin's avatar

    Posted on Oct 25, 2005 (permalink)

    Hi Jim,
    Thanks for your feedback. Your suggestion sounds very reasonable to us and we're adding it to our TODO list for the next version. We see only one little problem that could emerge - ordering of internal and external pages from one place. As the external pages won't reside in the RadDesignerPages table as the internal pages do it would be difficult to synchronize their common order of appearance. Of course we'll find some solution but I would be glad if you share your opinion with us.

    Kind regards,
    Chris
    the telerik team

    Reply

  • Jim Aderhold avatar

    Posted on Oct 25, 2005 (permalink)

    What I had in mind was using the same page setup you currently have, but adding in a flag, like the "Is Navigable", but would be something on the lines of "Is Internal." The page wold inherit all of the same characteristics except that you would also have a field for the external link. Then when rendering the menu, you just look for the flag and when available, use the external field as opposed to the PageID/PageName. I would imagine that this wold allow you to still order the pages as you normally would by keeping the same page structure that currently exists.

    Since I don't have all of the code for the pages, I am not sure how easy this would be. To me, it seems pretty easily attainable. But then again, I am not buildng the package.

    Will be glad to have this feature added in. Right now I have to hard code it in, and I hate hard-coding in things on a dynamic site. It is just asking for problems.

    Reply

  • Chris Chris admin's avatar

    Posted on Oct 27, 2005 (permalink)

    Hi Jim,
    Thanks again for sharing your ideas with us. We've already added your request to our TODO list for the next version of Sitefinity.

    Best wishes,
    Chris
    the telerik team

    Reply

  • Arne van Tintelen avatar

    Posted on Oct 27, 2005 (permalink)

    Hello,

    Can I add another request?

    Several Clients want to have a menugroup(with several subpages) where the group is not a page in sitefinity

    sample menutree:

    menuitem1 (link)
    menuitem2 (NO link)
        submenuitem1 (link)
        submenuitem2 (link)
        submenuitem3 (link)
    menuitem3

    To do this I currently use a little trick in which I use the string 'NOPAGE' in the unique pagename which in result prevents the hyperlink from being build for that menuitem. The page is still there but not accessable by the visitors.
    It would be nice if this option is also provided in a more logical way (by checkbox) to the user instead of using this workaround.

    Hope this helps.

    Arne van Tintelen
    AlienTrick.com

    Reply

  • Chris Chris admin's avatar

    Posted on Oct 31, 2005 (permalink)

    Hello Arne,
    We've added this feature request to our TODO list, too. Thanks for you feedback!

    Have a productive day,
    Chris
    the telerik team

    Reply

  • Jim Aderhold avatar

    Posted on Jan 5, 2006 (permalink)

    Just looking for an update to these requests. Will they be avilable in the next release, scheduled for this month, or will they be in a later release? We are looking at possibly building a site were this would be extremely handy.

    Reply

  • Vlad Vlad admin's avatar

    Posted on Jan 6, 2006 (permalink)

    Hi Jim,

    We apologize, that we gave you a wrong information for the next release date. We decide to add a support for .NET 2.0 and Oracle in it but we will not manage to release it this month. But we will do our best to implement the "External Page Link" feature.

    Meanwhile, you could use the solution you suggested in this forum, or use the following workaround:
    1. Create a custom control (i.e. ExternalPageControl), which will implement IDesignerControl and will redirect (Response.Redirect) the to a specific URL, if the IDesignerControl.PageName (the page name) has a specific name;
    2. Create a layout (i.e. ExternalPageLayout) with a single cell and add ExternalPageControl control to the layout cell;
    3. When creating an external link page, set the page to use ExternalPageLayout layout.


    Kind regards,
    Vlad
    the telerik team

    Reply

  • James Dykes avatar

    Posted on Feb 20, 2006 (permalink)

    With regard to Arne van Tintelen's request, I believe we are wanting something similar on our Sitefinity project.  I am new at this, so please excuse my rough terminology.

    We have a left side navigation that is built with children links.  We would like to be able to include "subheaders" with the children links that would group them by category.  For example, we have a large archive of journals that we would like to group by year.  The subheaders would not be links.  Is there a way to do this with Sitefinity 2.0?  Is there a "work-a-round" such as the one mentioned by Arne?  Are they trying to do the same thing?  And if so, can you explain in more detail how you made this work, Arne?

    Thanks!  Any help is greatly appreciated.

    Mary Douglas
    The Missouri Bar


    Reply

  • Vlad Vlad admin's avatar

    Posted on Feb 23, 2006 (permalink)

    Hello James,

    There are different workarounds to accomplish such navigation in Sitefinity and they depend of several points. Could you further describe your task by answering the following questions?
    1. What kind of left navigation control you intend to use - r.a.d.menu, r.a.d.treeview, r.a.d.panelbar or own custom navigation control?
    2. How will the navigation control bind its items - from XML file or from CMS API (Sitefinity generic pages)?
    3. As for the "large archive of journals" example. Does each journal have its own page or a journal id is sending by the request to the common page? Does the journal  page external for Sitefinity Web Site or it is a generic page? Can you give us an example of the menu items hierarchy and descriptions of the items(generic page, external page, etc...)?

    Actually, you can open your Sitefinity web application in Visual Studio.NET (the VS.NET project is automatically created when you create a self-contained project). In VS.NET you can customize the existing navigation controls (i.e. RadMenuControl.ascx.cs\.vb), changing the code for building menu items.



    Sincerely yours,
    Vlad
    the telerik team

    Reply

  • Arne van Tintelen avatar

    Posted on Feb 24, 2006 (permalink)

    James,

    Sorry for my late reply...I noticed the question just this morning.

    Actually it is quite simple. You just have to change the LoadMenuItems function in the RadMenuControl code (in my case RadmenuControl.ascx.vb)

    In it you will find a line which starts with item.href.
    Change this line by the code shown below.

    Sitefinity v1.1
    If Left(UCase(CStr(childRow("PageName"))), 6) = "NOPAGE" Then
        'show no link
    Else
            item.Href = CStr(childRow("PageGuid")) + ".aspx"
    End If

    In Sitefinity v2.0 it should be something like this:
    If Left(UCase(childPage.Details.Name), 6) = "NOPAGE" Then
        'show no link
    Else
            item.Href = Helper.GetPageUrl(newPageName, childPage.Guid)
    End If

    NOTES:
    - Unique Pagename MUST start with 'NOPAGE' in order to get it to work.
    - The page is still created but just not clickable for the user.
    - Limitation: Page can still be found by the default sitesearch used in sitefinity even if the option 'show in menu' is turned off.

    Hope this helps.

    Arne van Tintelen
    Alientrick.com

    Reply

  • john pether avatar

    Posted on Jul 19, 2006 (permalink)

    Just came up against a similar problem where I needed menu items passing parameters to another page.

    It's quick and dirty but gives me the functionality I need, someone may find it useful:

    if (page.Details.MetaTitle != "NoPage")
    {
    item.NavigateUrl =     Helper    .GetPageUrl(page.Details.Name, page.Guid);
    }
    if (page.Details.MetaTitle.Contains("LINK:"    ))
    {
    item.NavigateUrl = page.Details.MetaTitle.Replace(    "LINK:", "~/"    );
    }

    Page MetaTitle would then be "LINK:page.aspx?type=1"

    Reply

  • john pether avatar

    Posted on Jul 19, 2006 (permalink)

    ooops...:

    if (page.Details.MetaTitle.Contains("LINK:"))
    {
    item.NavigateUrl = page.Details.MetaTitle.Replace(    "LINK:", "~/");
    }
    else if (page.Details.MetaTitle != "NoPage")
    {
    item.NavigateUrl =     Helper.GetPageUrl(page.Details.Name, page.Guid);
    }

    Reply

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