Java-JSP Interface for HierMenus - WebReference.com (1/4)

A Java-JSP Menu Builder for HierMenus

By Paulo Caroli and Srimant Misra

This article shows you how to generate the menu content for a hierarchical menu dynamically. WebReference.com sells HierMenus, a DHTML hierarchical menu that provides cross-browser navigation of your Web site through drop down and pop-up menus. This article enables you to extend such a hierarchical menu, adding the capability to work with dynamic content.

In Web applications menus are widely used; for some applications non-static menu content is needed. A menu can have dynamic content for a variety of reasons: a menu that changes each day of the week, a menu with user specific content, or a menu that has its contents coming from a constantly changing data source.

HierMenus is a great JavaScript implementation of hierarchical menus that organizes its DHTML code in separate JavaScript files, one of which is HM_Arrays.js that contains the data for the static menu content. By having the HM_Arrays.js contents generated on the fly, you add more dynamism to your HierMenus behavior.

Following we show you how to get HierMenus to work with JSP for dynamic menu content generation. First, we demonstrate and code a data structure for encapsulating menu contents and then we disclose how you use this data structure for adding the dynamic menu content capability to the HierMenus JavaScript menu.

Requirements:

HierMenus JavaScript files. HierMenus is available at http://hiermenuscentral.com.

Tomcat or some other servlet container. Tomcat is available at http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/.

The Java data structure classes HMContentTree, HMContentTreeRoot and HMContentTreeItem. Their code is provided later in this article.

This article presents a solution based on a JSP platform. The same data structure can be implemented in other languages and the solution adapted to an ASP platform.

You don't need to know the details of HierMenus or need to be an expert in JavaScript in order to make use of the Java/JSP extension of HierMenus described in this article. You do, however, have to know how to execute the basics of HierMenus with default parameters and have a minimal understanding of JSP technologies.