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20021207 Saturday December 07, 2002

Struts Menu - Improved! Well after working until 4 in the morning last night and most of the day today - I'm happy to say that I've completed my desired changes on Struts Menu. I've been talking with the inventor, Scott Sayles, and hopefully I can get these changes committed in the next day or so. The biggest improvements I made were adding new Displayers - one for CoolMenus (CoolMenu4) and one for DHTML Lists (ListMenu). I also added support for a roles attribute (comma-delimited) that will hide menus when users are not in that role. Of course, you will have to use container-managed security for that to work, but it's easy - right? I'm thinking we should probably add a denyRoles attribute as well, as its a pain to add 5 roles just to exclude 1.

The problems I ran into with CoolMenus4 seem to be CSS related, and the Dropdown DHTML List is a little funky when you have too many nested items. Please feel free to dig in and fix these -> should be easy using good ol' view-source copying some files locally if you like. I can also post the source if you'd like, but I think you're more interested in just a demo.

Click here for a demo (expires on 12-15-02), or download the source.

The coolest thing about this bad-ass menuing system is that you can choose a new type of menu just by changing your JSP. Of course, a little magic and you can do it based on request variables or something of the sort. Check out the permissions page for an example.

The sweetest improvement I can think of is to now make the menu-config.xml file editable through a browser - and it'll save the results for you. Even sweeter - if you're really nuts - have this UI talk to struts-config and allow you to select forwards for locations! I could dig in and work on this thing for a week - but alas, I have a chapter to write! Too bad I'm only halfway done and it's due tomorrow :-( Oh well, at least the chapter will demonstrate some good code! Posted in Java at Dec 07 2002, 10:28:21 AM MST 2 Comments

Comments:

I downloaded the example code, ran the ant script to build, copied the .war file into Tomcat and now I get "org.apache.jasper.JasperException: The menu repository could not be found." Suggestions?

Posted by Melonie Brown on December 12, 2002 at 12:23 AM MST #

77

Posted by 196.203.16.208 on August 23, 2005 at 01:49 AM MDT #

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Matt Raible is the Lead UI Architect at LinkedIn. The opinions on this site are mine, not my employers.
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