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The Dynamic Navigation Widget (FREE)
What is it?
The Dynamic Navigation Widget is a combobox that automatically indexes all pages in your Book or Background. When the user selects a page name in the combobox ToolBook will navigate to the page with that name.
Whats so special about it?
It will index more than 100 pages (in fact I havent found the upper limit yet) and it will export to DHTML.
So if you have more than a few pages and you export to DHTML you might find the widgets useful.
See a demo of how it works
How Does it work
1) Drag the object from your catalog to a page or a background in your
book.
2) The Extended properties dialog is displayed. When you are satisfied with
the settings click OK, and the Widget will update its index to work with
the pages in your book.
Extended Properties
Index all pages in the book or Index pages in the
book
Specifies whether the combobox should index the pages of the background
the object is placed - on or all pages in the book.
Automatically update index on reset
The index is automatically updated when the book is reset. Unchecking this
option will turn the automatic update feature off.
Ignore pages with skipnavigation set to true
If this option is checked, pages that have skipnavigation set to true will
not be included in the index.
Important Notes
Actions
Because of the way the actions needed for the Widget to function
are created, it is not possible to edit or assign actions to the widgets.
Setting Properties
You can edit all the built in properties of the Combobox such as the fillColor,
whether to sort items in the combobox, whether to put a scrollbar on the
combox, change the borderstyle etc. The only limitation is that you cannot
edit or assign actions to the Widget.
About Indexing
Pages are indexed by name, so pages must be uniquely named.
For pages that does not have a name "Page" [pagenumber of the
page] will be used. For example a page with pagenumber 2 would be referred
to as "Page 2" (without the qoutes).
There is a Userproperty that can be set to change what prefix of the page is. Setting the imediate_PagePrefix userproperty of the Dynamic Navigation Widget to "side" (the danish word for Page). So an unnamed page with pagenumber 2 will be indexed as "side 2" (without the qoutes).
Do you need it?
If you just need to be able to navigate to a few pages, or if you can use Openscript at runtime it is not that difficult to create similar functionality.But if you:
1) export your ToolBook content to DHTML
2) Need to index more than a few pages
- I think you will find these widgets useful.
Availabilty
The Dynamic Navigation Widget works for both Native and DHTML ToolBook and is available for ToolBook Instructor and Assistant 2004 SP3. Download it here. After downloading the sample file, simply add the Dynamic Navigation Widget to your catalog from the sample file.
Price
The Dynamic Navigation Widget costs 50$ USD is free.
If you have any problems or questions please contact Tomas Lund at tlund@elearningspecialist.com