Breadcrumbs integration in OFBiz

[Tom GIBERT <to...@nereide.fr>]

To whom it may concern,

I’m in an intership in french company NEREIDE. The subject of the 
intership is to create Java objects for OFBiz which would handle 
breadcrumbs. Theses objects are meant to help building breadcrumbs on a 
page. We thought that adding some of them to the framework could be 
interesting and useful for OFBiz development.

BreadCrumbs are pretty useful items, there can help a lot of users to 
have a better understanding of what they are manipulating on an 
application. That is why nowadays Breadcrumbs are very commons. There a 
are a lot of different kinds of breadcrumbs and currently in OFBiz it is 
possible to build one for an application but there is no object to help. 
There are always developed as specific objects to application whereas a 
lot of them have a common pattern.

What I have done within my internship is a solution that ease the 
creation process of breadcrumbs. I designed objects meant to support 
recurrents patterns. The goal is for the developper to give necessarie 
infromation to the adapted object then it delivers through an adapted 
format all needed information to print the breadcrumbs on screen. Thus, 
some development time is gonna be saved.

For example, in OFBiz the same kind of breadcrumbs are used on 
e-commerce or management websites for “Product” entity, showing the 
hierarchy of categories. With a breadcrumb object, it is possible to get 
all the names and links to build a trail of hyperlinks just by giving 
the productId to it. This would avoid re-coding the same kind of 
algorithm questioning database to climb hierachy and all cache 
management. A breadcrumb object of this kind could be implemented in 
standard OFBiz in the product application.

I’ve done several objects for different kinds of breadcrumbs and I’d 
like to share them as a contribution to the OFBiz project, and get your 
precious feedback.

Regards,

GIBERT Tom