Constellation.Feature.Navigation 9.0.19.26217

VERSION 9.0.18 HAS BREAKING CHANGES


Constellation is a collection of utilities for .NET CMS implementers.
The Feature.Navigation library solves the frequently occurring problem that the primary navigation or footer navigation of a website does not necessarily
share organization with the contents of the content tree. The reason may be differing SEO goals on URL construction, the need to name something differently
in navigation as opposed to the Page's heading values, or the need to construct a cross-cutting menu that draws Items from a wide variety of locations. This
library also gracefully handles the need to have external or document links within a static navigation system (such as a "fat footer").

Static Navigation Components:
- Navigation Menu - This is a marker item that specifies the root of a static navigation definition for a given website. There can be many of these on any particular
website. It is recommended that these Items become the Datasource of your Navigation renderings.

- Navigation Link - This is the conceptual member of a navigation and represent a hyperlink, visible to the user, that actually navigates somewhere else (as opposed to
click-to-open style links or buttons) Includes the link as a General Link with all its available options, as well as a flag to indicate the link text should come
from the Navigation Link Item's Display Name, which is the recommended approach to ensure the Navigation definition in Sitecore looks like what you see on page. Can be nested.
- Image Navigation Link - Because there's always some navigation that is represented via icons rather than text. Inherits from above.

- Link Group - Allows for the grouping of Navigation links into named groups. Very useful for pull-down navigation menu options, or Fat Footers with named columns.
Can be nested.

- NavigationRepository.GetNavigation - Static method that accepts a Navigation Menu item and assembles a full tree-like ViewModel for immediate processing in your View.

When using NavigationLink objects, there are usually several opportunities to supply the text of a given link. NavigationLink.GetBestLinkText() evaluates all of them and attempts to
supply the best fit. The strategy is based on overriding the concept of "name". Here are the rules:
- If Use This Display Name is checked on the NavigationLink item, it wins.
- If the Link.Text is supplied by the user, it wins.
- If the Link.TargetItem exists and inherits from Page Navigation Title, and the field value is not null, it wins.
- If the Link.TargetItem exists its DisplayName is used.
- Assuming all other things are not true, use the NavigationLink's DisplayName. Note that in this condition if you intended to point to a Sitecore Item, you have a bad link.

Context Navigation Components:
- Page - This is a marker Template that should be assigned to any Template in your site that should be considered a page.
- Landing Page - This is a marker Template that signals that start of local section navigation.  Descends from Page
- List Page - This is a marker template that signals that child items are part of a large collection of like items, such as a Bucket. Descends from Page

- NavigationRepository.GetSectionNavigation - Static method that accepts the request Context Item (should be a Page) and generates a tree of NavigationNodes representing
the nearest LandingPage, its children, as well as the descendants of any children that are Ancestors of the Context Item. (will also create Children for the Context Item node
in the tree). Use this to produce the expanded navigation seen on many sites with deep content.

The included package must be installed to get the Templates required to use this library. This should happen automatically after you build and deploy your project.

Configured for use with Sitecore 9.0.
Requires Sitecore 9.0 NuGet packages, available here: https://sitecore.myget.org/F/sc-packages/api/v3/index.json
Requires the installation of the included Package.