We are needing a horizontal navigation bar in our website. We need to easily control the appearance of the items - such as background image, font, etc.
I have tried using outlines/horizontal, but it seems ridiculously difficult to attempt and have not had any luck.
This is such a simple and standard object needed in the most basic of websites. Does Domino have a good tool or way of creating and maintaining a horizontal navigation bar?
Thank you
Subject: Horizontal Navigation
You are asking for the holy grail:-)
You can do it with an embedded view or control with stylesheets. If I could set outlines to display as horizontal, I would do handstands the rest of my life.
Using the view approach is not overly difficult, just takes time.
Subject: Horizontal Navigation
Outlines are, unfortunately for you, the tool to use. Can you describe the problems you’re having?
Subject: RE: Horizontal Navigation
We just need the main navigation bar for our website. Does the “navigator” work well? I don’t see how I can embed a URL into a button that I create within a navigator.
The problem we’re encountering with the horizontal outline is the ability to control the position of the links, setting the background color and border styles.
When does one use a navigator rather than outline?
Thank you
Subject: RE: Horizontal Navigation
the ability to control the position of the links [snip]
Fair enough.
Navigators are…well, I know that there are people who don’t like them and I get the feeling that Lotus would love to get rid of them, but I think they’re kinda cool. Using a navigator will give you, in a away, the opposite problems you’re having with outlines. Where an outline will set up entries according to its own scheme with limited control by the designer, navigators provide no help whatsoever to the developer in terms of layout. You drop graphic elements on the navigator and have to align every single element by hand. When you access it through the web, the whole thing is rendered as a single big graphic and an accompanying image map. It can be a performance hit, but you can build yourself some pretty fancy navigation tools that way. Given the difficulties in getting them just right and the bandwidth they can eat up to push a big graphic through the pipe, I tend to use them when I can’t make anything else work. If you’re a more skilled graphics and layout person than I (and it’d be hard for you not to be), you might find them more useful.
There are several ways to add URL links to navigator hotspots. The easiest is to select the Open URL action from the Simple Actions list. Presumably, you could use a formula as well.
Subject: RE: Horizontal Navigation
SAY NO TO NAVIGATORS!!! They’re deprecated, and were deprecated in R5 as well.
Is there any reason you can’t use, say, a subform? A view as JavaScript?
If you have a small number of top-level links, then create them in passthru on a subform. If you need something more complex, then get hold of a decent DHTML menu script (there are a boatload of them on the web that you can Google, and most have online demos) and create a view that can feed it the parameters it needs.