Monday 14 October 2013

Dynamic navigation lists

In Apex, lists can be quite useful for navigation. In fact, when set up right you can have add a navigation list to your application that grows with each new page you add to your application, without the need to update your list. I worked this out in my demo application when I wanted to make it easier for people to browse through various pages.

In my demo app, there are a number of pages which I consider worth sharing, those pages I wanted in a navigation list. Then again, there are also always a number of pages that are under construction or just not that interesting. Those pages I didn't want to be included in the list. My solution was to use page aliases for the pages I wanted to include in my navigation list and create a dynamic list with a query on the apex pages view.

This goes as follows: first, under shared components, create a list. Make sure to choose a dynamic list, and as query use something like:

When prompted, you do not need to create the region yet. We will do this in the next step. For now just complete the creation of the list.

Next, on our global page (page zero), we create a new region and choose list as region type. Here you can also choose the region template. When prompted choose the list we created in the previous step and select an appropriate list type. As display condition we choose a condition such that the navigation list only appears in those pages that we want to be included in the list itself, here that are the pages containing a page alias. Choose [exists] as display condition and as expression use:

With this query, the list will only be displayed in the pages that have a page alias (except for the login page).

By now our list is completed. Now, if you add an alias to a page, the page will be added to the navigation list and the list will be included in that same page.

For more info on creating lists, you can check the Oracle docs.


Good luck!

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