XDIME navigation - icon

A graphical alternative to the tree navigation view is the Icon navigation view.

The presentation for this navigation view can best be described as a deck of pages, with each page containing a collection of links to other pages, URLs, or portlets. In this view, only one level of navigation is displayed on any particular page, giving the user the ability to move through the deck by clicking the links presented on each page.

Note: The aggregator makes no visual distinction between links to pages, portlets, or URLs, but that does not preclude the customer from using icon or caption differences that convey the distinction.

Using the icon view, pages, URLs, and portlets are displayed as icons accompanied by an optional caption. To avoid holes on a page where icon metadata is not specified, default images may be used.

Icon Flow

When the maximum width of the page is reached, a row is added and icons are added sequentially. When a portlet is selected it is maximized, such that it is the only portlet displayed on the page. The user must close or minimize a portlet to return to the navigation view.

A spatial iterator arranges icons on a page. This iterator is part of the layout that controls the rendering of navigation for the portal. The default device specific layout (for master) contains a spatial iterator with a 2-D indexing direction of Across Down, an unbounded number of rows, and a maximum of 3 columns. This will result in an arrangement of 3 icons per row, and N rows where N=(# of nodes)/3. This value may be changed in the layout policy.

If the default number of columns is undesirable for a particular device (or class of devices), then a device-specific layout that contains an iterator with an appropriate value may be created. Values of 1, 2, and 3 have been tested.