Adapt Learning Community: Expanding menu

Hi,

I'm a newbie, trying to get a handle on the framework and how we'd use it with our courses.

I've been playing around and successfully created a sub menu but it isn't exactly what I'd like. I'd like to have a main menu with menu items that expand when clicked, exposing the sub menu items, where each is clickable and would navigate to the appropriate content page. Something like this:

It looks like in order to do this, I'd need to create a new custom menu plugin and figure out how the NavigationView works and then possibly alter it at the core. I obviously don't want to do that. Am I over looking how the framework could work to accomplish this? Any advice is appreciated.

Thank you.

Rich

Not sure, depends why you think you need to alter NavigationView...?

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Hi Rich,

That's exactly what I wanted to do and I had a just build an extension (plugin) myself. The trickiest bit was finding a reliable way to create a hierarchical representation of the course structure (including _type, displayTitle, _id, and _parentId).

I think Adapt.contentObjects.models[0].getAncestorModels()[0].attributes._children._byId was the only way I could find which was in the correct order.

I'd contribute my plugin, but it's very rough!

It does seem very odd that the AT encourages structuring a course with a hierarchical/tree structure using the 'Add sub menu' button, but the exported course (and the available plugins) don't seem to provide any way to navigate it using that same structure.

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I think Adapt.contentObjects.models[0].getAncestorModels()[0].attributes._children._byId was the only way I could find which was in the correct order.

You can get the same data via the much shorter piece of code:

Adapt.contentObjects._byId

The whole ethos behind Adapt is that it's there for you to be able to extend as you need...

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Hi Matt,

It looks like I tried that before, and I just tried it again. Adapt.contentObjects._byId seems to return things in the wrong order.

I don't remember every detail because it was the middle of last year when I last looked at it in depth but I seem to remember that contentObjects.json itself stores them in the same wrong order.

I remember trying to work out which part of the AT code parses it and displays it in the right order in the AT menu editor so that I could use similar logic to get Adapt.contentObjects._byId in the right order, but I couldn't find anything.

I also wrote my own version of https://github.com/cgkineo/adapt-quicknav/ because of the same issues.

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Hi Stu

Not sure how that's happening then because Adapt.contentObjects.models[0].getAncestorModels()[0].attributes._children._byId looks to me like it's just a much longer way of stating the same thing, equivalent to saying 'give me an ordered list of my eldest son's parents' children'...

Note that _byId is private property of Backbone so it's not really intended to be accessed directly like that. Adapt.contentObjects will give you a Backbone Collection that you can iterate through, equally Adapt.contentObjects._byAdaptID might be a better way.

It may be down to how the AT automatically generates and assigns IDs to contentObjects/articles/blocks/components - I do most of my work in the Framework so am used to being able to set these up for myself.

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