Hi,
I have a conceptual question (or idea) I would like to
discuss with
the experience people out there.
My background: experienced developer for GUI &
commercial apps, newbie
for web based applications.
Trigger: I found no structural support for handling the
navigation =
basic application structure inside Pylons.
Beeing a GUI kind of developer I'm quite accustomed to
something like
creating and manipulating "menu's" to guide the
user, and to restrict
what the user should be able to access.
What I see is that the link structure of a site somehow
represents the
options and functionalities - and that the main, basic
structure of a
website is doing primarily the same job - besides the fact
that links
may represent different things: access to content, access
to
functionality, access to external stuff, etc.
Beeing a orderly and structured nice guy I would like to
have a basic
functionality that offers me quick and easy design &
delivery of such
basic navigation capabilities - independent from any layout
stuff.
Thats the idea: all links which are "static" (in
terms of access) are
defined more-or-less by the application, to be more precise:
in the
pylon controllers. Call them NavLinks.
All those links should be put into a central storage - call
it the
Navigator. The navigator is responsible to create the
"right" set of
links (they are often called "topmenu",
"leftmenu", "rightmenu" in the
CSS style sheets), and to feed them into the HTML
generation
processing (using mako templates e.g.).
The Navlinks will have attributes like "access
groups", "access roles"
or "application states" which defines who is
allowed to access the
link. The Navigator will then use the data to select/filter
the final
link structure according to the data provided by the
application (user
is in group A, has role B, application is in state C).
Additionally there is the definition of views necessary - a
view is a
preselected (hand-choosen) selection of NavLinks which
represents a
specific basic access structure.
The Navigator would take the data of the Navlinks
(describing
controller, action, id etc), use the selected view for
getting the
basic structure and would filter the links additionally
according to
the users/application data. The result would be then put
into the HTML
generation process.
I have implemented a prototype which is quite
"handy" and I'm on
extending this approach to support a more generic approach.
I did the
prototyp for getting a better touch for the conceptual
aspect...
What I'm interested in: is this approach the way a
experienced
Pyloniac would go? How do you "build" the basic
structure of a
website? Do you hand-code such stuff? Are there libraries
used for
this?
Would such a generic Navigator + View + NavLink class system
be
interesting for the Pylons community? I would sponsor the
stuff since
I see that Pylons should offer such functionality beeing a
web
development environment...
Any discussion, critics, ideas welcome... 
Regards,
Andrew
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