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 access 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 daisywiki 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. 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 publically 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 (eg for different target audiences), you can create multiple sites in the Daisy 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'

Description of the navigation XML format

The simplest possible navigation tree description is the empty one:

<d:navigationTree xmlns:d="http://outerx.org/daisy/1.0#navigationspec">
</d:navigationTree>

Adding document nodes to it is easy:

<d:navigationTree xmlns:d="http://outerx.org/daisy/1.0#navigationspec">
  <d:doc id="26"/>  
  <d:doc id="32">
    <d:doc id="15"/>  
  </d:doc>
</d:navigationTree>

As shown, the nodes can be nested.

By default , the navigation tree will display the name of the document as the label of a node. However, sometimes you might want to change that, for example if the name is too long. Also, when editing the navigation tree description as a source document, it will quickly become difficult to figure out what node stands for what. Therefore, you can add an attribute called "label" to the d:doc elements:

<d:navigationTree xmlns:d="http://outerx.org/daisy/1.0#navigationspec">
  <d:doc id="26" label="Introduction"/>  
  <d:doc id="32" label="Hot Stuff">
    <d:doc id="15" label="Fire"/>
  </d:doc>
</d:navigationTree>

By default the ID of a document node is the document ID, but you can assign a custom ID by specifying it in an attribute called nodeId. The custom ID should not start with a digit and not contain whitespace.

To link to a document on another branch or in another language, add a branch and/or language attribute on the d:doc element. The value of the attribute can be a branch/language name or ID. By default, documents are assumed to be on the same branch and in the same language as the navigation tree document itself.

To insert a link to an external location (a non-Daisy document), use the link element:

<d:navigationTree xmlns:d="http://outerx.org/daisy/1.0#navigationspec">
  <d:doc id="26" label="Introduction"/>  
  <d:doc id="32" label="Hot Stuff">
    <d:doc id="15" label="Fire"/>
  </d:doc>
  <d:link url="http://outerthought.org" label="Outerthought"/>
</d:navigationTree>

The attributes url and label are both required. The link element supports an optional id attribute.

If you want to group a number of items below a common title, use the group element. The group element can optionally have an attribute called id to specify a custom id for the node (otherwise, the id is automatically generated, something like g1, g2, etc).

<d:navigationTree xmlns:d="http://outerx.org/daisy/1.0#navigationspec">
  <d:group label="Some title">
    <d:doc id="26" label="Introduction"/>  
    <d:doc id="32" label="Hot Stuff">
      <d:doc id="15" label="Fire"/>
    </d:doc>
  </d:group>
  <d:link url="http://outerthought.org" label="Outerthought"/>
</d:navigationTree>

To import another navigation tree, use the import element:

<d:navigationTree xmlns:d="http://outerx.org/daisy/1.0#navigationspec">
  <d:group label="Some title">
    <d:doc id="26" label="Introduction"/>  
    <d:doc id="32" label="Hot Stuff">
      <d:doc id="15" label="Fire"/>
    </d:doc>
    <d:import docId="81"/>
  </d:group>
  <d:link url="http://outerthought.org" label="Outerthought"/>
</d:navigationTree>

The docId attribute on the d:import element is of course the id of the navigation document to be imported.

It is possible to dynamically insert nodes by including a query, for example: 

<d:navigationTree xmlns:d="http://outerx.org/daisy/1.0#navigationspec">
  <d:doc id="26" label="Introduction"/>  
  <d:doc id="32" label="Hot Stuff">
    <d:doc id="15" label="Fire"/>
    <d:query q="select name where $somefield='hot' order by name"/>
  </d:doc>
</d:navigationTree>

It only makes sense to select one value using the query, that value will be used as the node label.

Since the query is embedded in an XML file, don't forget that you might need to escape certain characters, eg < should be entered as &lt;

The query element can have an optional attribute called filterVariants with value true or false. If true, the query results will be automatically limitted to the branch and language of the navigation document.

If you want to automatically limit the result of queries in the navigation tree to documents contained by one ore more collections, you can add a collections element as first child of the navigationTree element:

<d:navigationTree xmlns:d="http://outerx.org/daisy/1.0#navigationspec">
  <d:collections>
    <d:collection name="MyCollection"/>
  </d:collections>
  <d:doc id="26" label="Introduction"/>  
  <d:doc id="32" label="Hot Stuff">
    <d:doc id="15" label="Fire"/>
    <d:query q="select name where $somefield='hot' order by name"/>
  </d:doc>
</d:navigationTree>

The doc, group, query, link and import nodes can be combined and nested as you desire, with the exception that query and import can't have child elements.

Any other elements besides the ones mentioned here are prohibited, as is text in between the nodes.

Implementation notes

The Navigation Manager is implemented as an extension component running inside the repository server. It has its own HTTP+XML interface and remote Java API.

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