Better Navigation

ToolBookDeveloper Products

Upgrade required  in order to work with ToolBook 9.0+ and 9.5

• Add a navigation menu to ToolBook projects...Quickly and Simply

• You pick the pages you wish to include in the menu.

• Text from any record field on your page can be used to create the menu text.

• Overcome the limitations of the standard ToolBook Menu Widgets.

Are You Frustrated with ToolBook Automatic Menus?

Have you ever tried using the standard Automatic Menu Widget or the standard Popup Menu Widget?  These widgets only allow for all pages, a single page range or pages on selected backgrounds, sounds great, but what about just the first page of a given section/chapter, what about a sub-menu in a chapter?

The other big problem with these standard widgets is the use of the page name as the menu option text:-( This means that if you use a structured page naming scheme or you need more than 31 characters to describe the option then you can't use these tools.

AND what about a menu that is accessible on all pages of your exported ToolBook application?  It can't be done with the standard widgets unless you copy it to the foreground of every single page:-(

What are the Better Navigation Widgets?

Better Navigation Widgets are a set of three special navigation widgets - that's right, not just one widget, but three. All three widgets use the same extended properties editor which is an enhanced version of the standard Automatic Menu widget. The enhanced features make these widgets much more flexible and powerful for ToolBook developers yet they are user-friendly and easy for even novice developer to use.

The three widgets are:

1. An enhanced Automatic Menu.
2. An enhanced Popup Menu.
3. A new Drop Down Menu - uses a ToolBook ComboBox object.

Why Do I Need the Better Navigation Widgets?

1. If you don't want to use the page name as the menu option text - this is the only choice with the standard ToolBook Automatic Menu Widget.
2. If you need to be able to include only specific pages into your navigation menu.
3. If you need a menu that will function exactly the same in native ToolBook, Neuron, and DHTML ToolBook.
4. If you need you menu to be on the background so that it is accessible throughout your project without having to add a menu to the foreground of every page. When you put the Better Navigation Widgets on the background and they will be accessible on every page, even if they are coved by something on a page, they will be "Always On Top".
5. All of the programming work has been done for you. You just add it to your ToolBook project and customize it to suit your needs and you are done!  To create this type of a menuing system on your own would take you days or probably weeks - that's what it took me to create the widget.

How Does the Better Navigation Widgets Work During Development?

The Better Navigation Widgets are easy to use during development. Just drag the widget you need from the catalog onto your page or background . The extended properties will allow you to easily customize how the Better Navigation Widget will work in author and reader mode. The following demonstrates the extended properties editor.

This is the General tab and is the same for all three widgets. Note the first option which allows you to select the pages yourself.

Here we see the Select Pages Tab, notice that this book uses a structured page naming scheme. We would not want our menu to use the page name in this case. In this example we want the menu options to take us to the first page of each section, we know this because the pages that are selected all end with 001 being the first page of the section.

Because we have a structured page names we need to extract the text for the menu options from somewhere else in the ToolBook. The Option Text Tab allows us to select the text of recordFields.  In most ToolBook applications you would have a Title and maybe a Sub-Title recordField. Here we see that the menu option text can be drawn from more than one place.

The Additional Options Tab is available when using the Popup Menu or Drop Down Menu Widgets. For the Drop Down Menu Widget you can have the first option "Choose" or as we have it here: "Select a Page"

Here we can see the Automatic Menus based on the above settings:

Here we can see the Drop Down Menus based on the above settings:

Who Developed the Better Navigation Widgets?