Side nav navigation pane behavior - customizable?

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Louise Bennett
Propeller Head
Posts: 81
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2016 7:53 pm

Side nav navigation pane behavior - customizable?

Post by Louise Bennett »

I am wondering whether anyone knows of a way to make the selected item in a navigation pane (side nav template), the top item in the pane. The reason for this is that we have received usability feedback that the way the selected item is sometimes ending up at the bottom of the pane when the pane re-renders after selecting a new topic is annoying.

Our project contains about 200 individual guides, each of which can go to 4 levels of heading. So the navigation pane is quite large. Only one guide opens at a time, which helps reduce the pane's size, but moving from topic to topic in a guide's hierarchy results in the nav pane jumping around every time it refreshes. Ideally we could force the parent in the guide (which would be the guide name in our case), to be the top item in the navigation pane regardless of the position that that guide occupies in the overall list of guides.

Louise.
NorthEast
Master Propellus Maximus
Posts: 6359
Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2007 8:33 am

Re: Side nav navigation pane behavior - customizable?

Post by NorthEast »

You definitely can't do that with Flare's skin editor, and I think it might be quite a difficult thing to hack using CSS and scripts.

Mind, I think Side Nav works the same as the majority of other navigation menus, and it may be far more annoying to dynamically move around parts of the menu, as it would break your learning process of the menu structure.

What is annoying is that the highlighted menu item can often be displayed right at the bottom, and so isn't always that noticeable. Perhaps put in a feature request to scroll the highlighted item further up the page and nearer the middle.
Louise Bennett
Propeller Head
Posts: 81
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2016 7:53 pm

Re: Side nav navigation pane behavior - customizable?

Post by Louise Bennett »

Thanks Dave, that's what I thought might be the case to be honest.

I'll put in a feature request.

Louise.
Chris Kay
Jr. Propeller Head
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Jun 01, 2018 6:31 am

Re: Side nav navigation pane behavior - customizable?

Post by Chris Kay »

Has MadCap support got back to you concerning your feature request? We get the same complaint every now and then. But although I find the TOC behavior logical, I see why people may find it annoying. We even looked into hacking the JavaScripts, but we had a hard time finding the correct handler and stuff.
Louise Bennett
Propeller Head
Posts: 81
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2016 7:53 pm

Re: Side nav navigation pane behavior - customizable?

Post by Louise Bennett »

Not at this stage Chris.

Louise.
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