Use a custom NavigationHandler. :-) That's why the hook exists, so not using it is like saying you want to develop a JSF application without using JSF.
Have you ever used JDeveloper? (free download from Oracle, so if not, download it and take a look) Basically, it uses the exact process you describe (model showing pages as objects, the user draws lines between the pages and labels each line with the outcome on which to navigate from one object to the next), and creates the navigation rules from it. It sounds like the only difference between what you want and what JDeveloper demonstrates using the standard NavigationHandler is that you want to change the rules on the fly. Seems like that should be a fairly straight-forward customization of the existing handler -- worse case you'd copy the NavigationHandler source code, and change it to fetch data from an internal data source instead of a static set of rules read from the config file. And if you did it in a generic enough way, we might even be able to make it a configurable option for MyFaces where all you need to do is supply an alternate rule data source in your config file rather than providing an entire new navigation handler. If nothing else, we could probably support it as a Tomahawk option. Tomahawk already is set up to share code with MyFaces, so it should be trivial to push the navigation handler into the shared core project, add the hooks to customize it from Tomahawk, and create a Tomahawk subclass to make use of those hooks. On 4/16/07, Torsten Krah <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
By default jsf is using a outcome based navigation model. But consider a content managment system, where the user can model "navigation decisions" by "drawing" connections from one object to another. Data is modeled in some known way to map them to an url, navigation between this model can be defined from the user. The object defines the view to be rendered, how to navigate through the views, when the navigation decision is done in the model (have to be done there to be changeable by the user). How could this be done with JSF. Navigation rules have to be "there" before starting the webapp. So how can a navigation be handled in a jsf compatible way, to support dynamic made navigation rules in the model tier (and maybe support url based navigation). Is there any good way to do this, maybe some thought? Torsten PS: Please dont tell only to use a custom NavigationHandler (i guess, but dont know if all these wishes could be done with it), some more comments are welcome.
