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Customisable Main Menu

Due to the new General Layout and Menu Revision project this article has been revised.

This is an updated version of the request adapted to the new feature page structure and renamed.

This feature request has already been worked out in different versions and has especially the following background:

• Transfer of the functionalities, which are already offered by different Main-Menu-Plugins for some time: Adjusting the main navigation in order and content. The possibility to create your own main menu entries and make them available to certain user groups.
• Furthermore, the page layout revision for ILIAS 6 also results in a fundamental adjustment regarding the appearance of the main menu, this is described in the feature request General Layout and Menu Revision.

Related Feature Requests:

• Default Configuration of Main Bar Items (ILIAS 6)
• General Layout and Menu Revision

1 Initial Problem

In 5.3 the main menu is restricted to the menues for Personal Desktop, Repository and Administration. Plugins allow adding additional main menu entries.
With the General Layout and Menu Revision we propose to change the structure of the main menu. Our proposal aims to work well on as many installation as possible but due to the diverse workflows we believe it to be an imporant part of the concept to offer ways to customise this new menu.

2 Conceptual Summary

2.1 Terminologies

In order to describe the functions of the MainMenu but also its configuration, we propose the following terms together with this feature request. These will be helpful in the implementation of the elements in the UI service for ILIAS 6 to identify the elements.
 
In the current situation we have to do the balancing act between terms that we use implicitly or explicitly in the current ILIAS versions, terms that will still be valid in ILIAS 5.4 (as the appearance of the MainMenus will remain the same) and terms that will keep their validity if possible with the complete redesign of the MainMenu in ILIAS 6. This feature request suggests these terms, but makes them explicitly available for discussion.

JF DECISION NEEDED: The terms around the MainMenu should be finally decided, then the PR for the GlobalScreen service is adapted and merged.

2.2 Technical Background and Services

The technical aspects of this implementation are presented and discussed in Pull Request 1146. Nevertheless, the technical decisions also have an impact on the feature, as presented here.
Some important hints that already concern the current feature request due to the PR:

• "Default Main Menu Items" are supplied by so-called providers. These Items can not be deleted, only deactivated.
• Since many different providers can contribute entries to the Main Menu, the configuration (table) must be supplemented with a "Provider" column. This shows which provider delivers this one entry, so that the entries remain identifiable for the administrators even after a renaming.
• g. Slates can have Icons. We currently propose to pass the pathes to the icon as a string to the UX-Services. But this concept is not final since we could also have the possibility to pass UI-Elements directly.

 
The most important service for the implementation is the newly introduced GlobalScreen Service. The components communicate via it with the MainMenu (and later also with other components of the GlobalScreen).
The components thus deliver the "Default Main Menu Entries", the sorting and nesting is delivered with the help of a database step.

2.3 Administration

The administration in ILIAS should contain a new menu item, which allows the adaptation of the MainMenu.

JF DECISION NEEDED: The new menu item is called Administration -> Main Menu

The Main Menu Administration has two tabs

• Main Menu
• Permissions

and is divided into two subtabs (the naming refers to the decision above in the terms):

• Main Menu Subitems
• Main Menu Items

2.3.1 Subtab «Main Menu Subitems »

This subtab manages the entries in the Main Menu Items, i.e. the Main Menu SubItems. This table always shows a full view of all available items, regardless of whether they are displayed for a user or not. The following settings can be applied via the table and the Save button:
 

• Define affiliation to Main Menu Item
• Define sequence (Position column)
• Activate/deactivate entry (checkbox)

All further actions are accessible via the Actions menu:

• Edit
• Translate
• Delete (only for Custom)

The translation of an item is done in the same way as the translation screen of a multilingual category, for example:

Adding a new Sub Item is done with the following Form (from the new UI Service Form). Editing is done the same way but the Type is no longer changable:

2.3.2 Subtab «Main Menu Items»

This subtab manages the directly visible main entries in the menu, the Main Menu Items. In the case of ILIAS 5.4, the focus here is on the title, while in ILIAS 6 an icon is displayed. For the implementation of the administration in ILIAS 5.4 the icon is therefore not considered yet, but the abstraction in the GlobalScreen Service is already prepared to be able to work with icons.
 
As with the subitems, items that are already delivered with ILIAS cannot be deleted. Only self-created entries can be deleted.
 
Analogous to the subitems, the respective provider is named. Since only items of type Slate can currently be found in the first level of the menu, no Type column is displayed.
 
Items are translated in the same way as subitems.

The following settings can be made directly in this table:

• Position (sequence in the display in the Main Menu)
• Active: Setting whether this main menu item should be displayed or not.
• Sticky: Decision whether this item is also displayed when space is scarce (in the mobile view)

Unlike an earlier version of this request, there is no additional checkbox for "Mobile", as this is already done by "Sticky".
The remaining actions are located in the actions menu of the respective entry.
A column indicates how many subitems are present in an item.

Adding a new Main Menu Item is done with the following form (UI Service). Editing an Item is done accordingly, but the Type can't be changed anymore. Please note that the "Type" options need to be discussed:

JF DECISION NEEDED: 

• Should Main Menu Items themselves be allowed to be links (or other types)? if so, which types are allowed?
• ILIAS 5.4 won't have Icons in the Main Menu Items, therefore the Administration should not have according settings (e.g. a column Icon as proposed in a former version of this request)

2.4 Types

• Slate -> Main Menu Item
• Link -> Simple Link provides by the Core-Provider or Plugin
• RepositoryLink -> link to an item in the repository (Ref-ID). The Item in the Main menu is only visible of the users sees the object in the Repository (RBAC)
• LinkList -> a List of multiple links which will appear in the order given by the provider and can have a title
• Complex Item -> Rich content and mostly asynchronous loaded content, e.g. the Administration-Menu-Item or the whole Last-Visited + Repository
• Separator -> Visual separator between to items
• Plugin -> only the interface has to be implemented, types can be whatever they want to provide

Special case "Separator"
In the MainMenu in ILIAS 5.3 it already has separators, which visually separate individual entries in the "Personal Desktop", for example. In the implementation in ilMainMenuGUI these separators sometimes have several conditions that they appear. For example, a separator is only displayed before the "Calendar" entry if either LearningProgress, Badges, Skills, Portfolio, Workspace or Staff are activated (to prevent two separators from following each other). Such dependencies would no longer be possible with the new MainMenu service. Therefore, separators in ILIAS 5.4 are always deletable entries and can be created as often as necessary. In the default delivery, corresponding separators are included, but they do not disappear automatically if, for example, a service is deactivated after installation.

Special case "Complex Item"
In ILIAS 5.4 there will be two Complex Items:

• The Content of the Administration Menu Item which will be loaded asynchronously
• The Last Visited Item

2.5 Plugins

We recommend that all plugin types (not only UI) can act as providers of main menu items and subitems. This allows any plugin to offer a variety of new functions and at the same time the core is not affected. The UI hook plugins should also be able to explicitly deliver new types.
This results in two functions for Plugins:

• Offer items for the main menu (aka Global Screen Provider). Only existing types can be delivered (or at runtime known, e.g. from other plugins, which is not recommendes but not impossible). These cannot be deleted in the administration as well as core items, but can be deactivated. It makes sense for plugins to provide a MainMenu item with all its subitems. If a plugin is deactivated or deleted, the MainMenu items also disappear.
• UIHook plugins can also explicitly provide new types for the creation of custom items. These are offered when custom items are created in administration and provide additional settings and options in the creation and editing form. The UI hook plug-in is responsible for storing the specific data and also for rendering such types.

Types provided by plugins can be of parent type custom and therefore can be deleted.

3 User Interface Modifications

3.1 List of Affected Views

• New Entry in the Administration Menu: Main Menu
• Two tabs
  • Main Menu
  • Permissions
• Two Subtabs in "Main Menu"
  • Main Menu Subitems
  • Main Menu Items

Proposed location of the new Entry in the Administration Menu:

3.2 User Interface Details

Please see the specific screens directly in the mockups above.

3.3 New User Interface Concepts

There are no new concepts needed. 

4 Technical Information

5 Contact

• Author of the Request: Tödt, Alexandra [atoedt] for version 1, Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel] for version 2, Seiler, Yvonne [yvseiler] & Amstutz, Timon [amstutz] for version 3, Schmid, Fabian [fschmid] for current version
• Maintainer: {Please add your name before applying for an initial workshop or a Jour Fixe meeting.}
• Implementation of the feature is done by: Schmid, Fabian [fschmid]

6 Funding

If you are interest in funding this feature, please add your name and institution to this list.

• ...

7 Discussion

Killing, Alexander [alex], 3 July 2018: It would be easily possible to extend the ilUIHookPluginGUI slot with an additional method getMainMenuSlateEntries() that e.g. can return at least a set of Links. If we can agree on a feasible return type for such a method, plugins could extend the main menu already in the first version.

Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel], 13 AUG 2018 : Some questions and comments from my side:

• Concerning Add Slate Entry: We have to support titles in all languages activated on a system, not only German and English. 'Multilinguality' can be implemented similar to categories. And how do I enter the link target or the link list items? Does this happen on a second screen or is a form opened when clicking one of the radio boxes?
• Concerning Edit Slate Entry: If we only support permalinks (and external http links I assume), we need to guarantee that all possible link targets in the system have permalinks (which is not the case yet).

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], 27 AUG 2018 : We discussed Fabian's questions:

• Shall Entries be able to be deleted or not? Main menu entries provided by the system (like 'Overview' or 'Repository') should only be deactivated but not deleted. This means that each on these entries can only appear once (but nevertheless a second entry to such a target can be made by adding a link).
• We discussed if the administration interface should use technical terms (like "slate") or common terms (like "main menu entry" and "main menu sub-entry") but postponed this discussion to the feature page.

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], 08 OCT 2018 : We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule it for 5.4 with the following changes / modificatons:

• We would like to use the term "item" instead of "entry" (new labels are already changed by Fabian in chap 2)
• We would like to have a filter (All | Active) for the list of items.
• We can remove the 'sticky' option because this won't be needed for 5.4.
• We would like to have an additional column 'CSS ID' for the top item table.
• We would like to prevent double separators (should be handled when menu is rendered).
• All type plugins should be allowed to add items to the main menu.
• Top items of the main menu could already be links.

8 Implementation

The whole feature has been implemented as described above. Screenshots of the implementation:

Test Cases

Test cases completed at {date} by {user}

• 24997: Link-Haupteintrag hinzufügen
• 25066: Link-Haupteintrag in Sprachen übersetzen
• 24998: Container-Haupteintrag hinzufügen 
• 24999: Haupteintrag deaktivieren 
• 25001: Sortierung ändern 
• 25002: Link-Eintrag hinzufügen 
• 25003: Trenner-Eintrag hinzufügen 
• 25004: Eintrag deaktivieren 
• 25005: Eintrag deaktivieren 
• 25006: Sortierung ändern 
• 25007: Zuweisung zu Haupteintrag ändern 
• 25000: Haupteintrag mit Zuweisung löschen 

Approval

Approved at 26.10.2018 by Amstutz, Timon [amstutz].