5.5 Navigation

5.5.1 Overview

Daisy allows to create hierarchical navigation trees for your site. Some of the features and possibilities:

• navigation trees are dynamically generated for the current user and the current document. Documents for which the user has no read permission are removed from the navigation tree, as are retired documents or documents which don't have a live version.

• a navigation tree is defined as an XML document, and the resulting navigation tree output is also an XML document (in the Daisy Wiki styled through XSLT).

• a navigation tree can be requested in 'full' or 'contextualized', in case of this last option the navigation tree only contains expanded branches for the nodes leading to the current document. In the Daisy Wiki, this option can be configured in the siteconf.xml file.

• a navigation tree can contain queries for automatic insertion of nodes.

• navigation trees are stored as normal documents in the repository. They should use the predefined "Navigation" document type. Versioning thus also works for the navigation tree source, the live version of the navigation tree is the one that will actually be used (but it can also be the last version, see also further on). Normal access control can be used to restrict who can edit the navigation tree or read it (it = the navigation tree source). Other then this, navigation trees are publicly accessible: everyone can request the navigation tree output of a given navigation document.

• a navigation tree can include other navigation trees. This allows to separate the management of a navigation tree over multiple (groups of) users, each one having the right to edit their part of the navigation tree. This also enables reuse of navigation trees in different locations.

• to view the same documents in combination with different navigation trees (e.g. for different target audiences), you can create multiple sites in the Daisy Wiki.

• a navigation tree is generated with a version mode: 'live', 'last' or @date. When in last mode, the last version of the navigation tree document will be used, as well as of any imported navigation tree. Queries embedded in the navigation tree will be executed with the "search_last_version" option, and documents which have no live version will also become visible. For document related nodes, the document name will be taken from the last version (if no node label is specified), and the read access details should allow access to non-live versions. All this together is useful when working with version modes in the wiki.

The Daisy Wiki has an advanced GUI for editing the navigation trees, so that users are not confronted with the raw XML. It is of course possible to switch to a source view. Editing a navigation tree is done in the same way as any other document is edited.

It is possible to create readable URLs (i.e. URLs containing readable names instead of numbers) by basing the URL space on the navigation tree and assigning meaningful node IDs to nodes in the navigation tree. See the document about URL management.

The 'root' navigation document of a site is accessible through the [Edit navigation] link below the navigation tree, which is visible is you are logged on as a non-guest-role user. You can also get an overview of all navigation documents using this query:

select id, branch, language, name where documentType = 'Navigation'