Unified Navigation System for JSF (menus, breadcrumbs, sitemap)

Question

We're using MyFaces, Richfaces & Restfaces to build a website on top of Oracle Stellant CMS. We're not using Site Studio. Are there any widgets/combination of widgets out there that could provide a unified navigation system? The site structure needs to be read from a DB table and CMS metadata fields, and we need a top tab menu, an expandable sidebar menu, breadcrumbs, and a sitemap (bonus points if it uses the sitemaps.org standard). We're currently using a combination of autonomous hand-rolled and off-the shelf widgets that aren't interoperating very well - the different navigation features aren't staying in sync as the site is navigated.

Answer 1

We faced a very similar issue last year and didn't find any set of widgets that could provide an integrated solution (we were using JSF, Facelets, RichFaces & Spring).

We ended up developing our own navigation system with menu state holders (stored per session) and the breadcrumbs would just go up in the menu tree from the current selection to construct itself.

The menu model itself was built once at application startup (read from an xml file) using Spring and bound to the view using facelets (

<rich:tabPanel id="topMenu" binding="#{menuBean.menu}" />

Keeping the components in sync was mainly managed by a Spring WebFlow FlowExecutionListener

Hope this helps..