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Posted to users@cocoon.apache.org by Keijo Lehto <ma...@koodiorja.com> on 2003/03/16 00:15:08 UTC

Creating a MenuGenerator based on DirectoryGenerator

Hi,

I'm thinking about writing my own "MenuGenerator" by modifying 
org.apache.cocoon.generation.DirectoryGenerator so that it will read the 
filesystem under my "mount" directory and generate <section>s from 
directories and <resource>s from certain XML files under those 
directories under mount.

The generator would be called every time a user requests for a resource 
on the site and the generator would then decide what 
directories/resources would be shown in the menu based on current user's 
permissions (linking between users, user groups and resources will be 
located in a database). If I've understood correctly, this wouldn't 
cause too much payload for the server since the results would be cached 
and the menu would have to be generated only if the site structure 
changes, right?

The question is: Am I doing something really stupid here? I'm kind of 
newbie with Cocoon and I most certainly haven't yet understood the whole 
potential of it so all comments are more than welcome. However, the site 
I'm building should be completely dynamic and, therefore, the menu 
creation should be somewhat realtime. Is there a component that would do 
this already?

An example menu generated by the generator could be as follows:

<menu>
   <section name="Studying">
      <resource name="index.xml"/>
      <resource name="freshmen.xml"/>
      <resource name="links.xml"/>
   </section>

   <section name="Something else">
    ...
   </section>   
</menu>

and it would be aggregated in cocoon sitemap and shown in the final 
output for the user.

Cheers,
Keijo


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PhpGenerator help

Posted by JD Daniels <jd...@datatrio.com>.
Has anyone gotten the phpgenerator to work? I have followed this page:

http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp?page=PHPGenerator

and do not get any error messages.. just a blank html page (The html/body
tags are present, just no content)

My config:

Redhat 7.3
tomcat 4.1.18
Cocoon 2.1-dev (March 16 cvs checkout)

My phpsrvlt.jar is only 10k ... seems kinda small - Is this right?

JD


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Re: Creating a MenuGenerator based on DirectoryGenerator

Posted by Miles Egan <mi...@caddr.com>.
On Sat, 2003-03-15 at 15:15, Keijo Lehto wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm thinking about writing my own "MenuGenerator" by modifying 
> org.apache.cocoon.generation.DirectoryGenerator so that it will read the 
> filesystem under my "mount" directory and generate <section>s from 
> directories and <resource>s from certain XML files under those 
> directories under mount.

We're doing something like this on our site.  It works pretty well and
is fairly straightforward.

miles


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Re: Creating a MenuGenerator based on DirectoryGenerator

Posted by Upayavira <uv...@upaya.co.uk>.
> Is there a name for this pattern?  That's exactly what a Struts 
> ActionForward (or is it Actionmapping?) is!  And there's another name
> for it in Maverick.

Forrest calls it 'Semantic Linking', to quote from 
http://xml.apache.org/forrest/linking.html:

"Forrest's solution is simple: instead of <link href="todo.html">, write <link 
href="site:todo">, where: 

site is a URI 'scheme'; a namespace that restricts the syntax and semantics of the 
rest of the URI [rfc2396]. The semantics of 'site' are "this identifier locates something 
in the site's XML sources". 
todo identifies the content in todo.xml, by reference to a 'node' of content declared in 
site.xml. 
We call this semantic linking because instead of linking to a physical representation 
(todo.html), we've linked to the 'idea' of "the todo file". It doesn't matter where it 
physically lives; that will be sorted out by Forrest. 

Regards, Upayavira


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Re: Creating a MenuGenerator based on DirectoryGenerator

Posted by Ryan Hoegg <rh...@isisnetworks.net>.
Upayavira wrote:

>One thing that Forrest does which is impressive (which I will steal for my site at some point) is to allow linking to other pages in a site without knowing the page's final URL. 
>When linking to a page, you use the page's ID. A couple of input modules and a transformer then translate that ID into the proper URL.
>  
>
Is there a name for this pattern?  That's exactly what a Struts 
ActionForward (or is it Actionmapping?) is!  And there's another name 
for it in Maverick.

--
Ryan Hoegg
ISIS Networks
http://www.isisnetworks.net


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Re: Creating a MenuGenerator based on DirectoryGenerator

Posted by Upayavira <uv...@upaya.co.uk>.
> The question is: Am I doing something really stupid here? I'm kind of
> newbie with Cocoon and I most certainly haven't yet understood the
> whole potential of it so all comments are more than welcome. However,
> the site I'm building should be completely dynamic and, therefore, the
> menu creation should be somewhat realtime. Is there a component that
> would do this already?

When I first came to Cocoon, I had similar thoughts about deriving the navigation 
from the files themselves. However, I decided against it in the end, and decided to 
follow the model used by Forrest, which is to use a 'linkmap' document. Having made 
this decision, my site (70 pages+) was up and running two hours later - so it obviously 
worked.

One thing that Forrest does which is impressive (which I will steal for my site at some 
point) is to allow linking to other pages in a site without knowing the page's final URL. 
When linking to a page, you use the page's ID. A couple of input modules and a 
transformer then translate that ID into the proper URL.

Hope this helps.

Regards, Upayavira


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