What is it?
The Dynamic Navigation Widget is a combo box that automatically indexes all pages in your Book or Background. When the user selects a page name in the combo box ToolBook will navigate to the page with that name.
What’s so special about it?
It will index more than 100 pages (in fact I haven’t 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.
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 combo box 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 combo box such as the fill Color, whether to sort items in the combo box, whether to put a scrollbar on the combo box, change the border style 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 quotes).
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 quotes).
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.
Installation
The Dynamic Navigation Widget works for both Native and DHTML ToolBook and is available for ToolBook 2004 and ToolBook 9. Download the sample file from the Download page and unzip it. Then open the ToolBook file and select the Dynamic Navigation Widget at author level, then right click in the catalog an select add selected object to catalog.
License
It’s free - use at own risk.
Happy ToolBook'ing
Tomas