Generated Menus

One of the points of CWF is that it provides an API you can use to generate your urlpatterns and menu system from without repeating yourself.

So part of the options available is about saying how the sections are represented in the menu system.

Section menu options

The options available that directly affect how a section appears in the menu are as follows:

admin

Hardcode that a section should be displayed as only available via admin privelege.

display

Whether to show this section at all.

Note that this option will not propogate to it’s children if the propogate_display option is False.

alias

What name is displayed to the end user for this section.

values

Allows you to have this section appear multiple times with different values. See Section Values

promote_children

Whether to display the children of this section at the same level as this section. See Promoted Sections

propogate_display

Whether the display option should be propogated to a section’s children.

Section Values

There exists a situation where a section can contain multiple values and you want your menu to display all those possible values.

CWF provides the values option for specifying this.

This option should be set to an object with a get_info method that returns a list of [(url, alias), (url, alias), …] where each pair represents another value.

To assist with this, CWF provides the cwf.sections.Values object.

Note

This functionality will also work with child sections such that each value will get all the children of the original section and those children may have their own collection of values and so on.

The Values object takes the following options:

values

The values to use.

This can be a list of [value, value, value, …].

Or it can be a callable lambda ((request, parent_url_parts, path)) : [value, value, value, …]

Where request is the request object, path is a list of the parts that makes up the current url. And parent_url_parts is all the parts in the url leading up to the parent of the current section.

each

A callable lambda ((request, parent_url_parts, path), value) : (url, alias)

If this isn’t set, then the alias and url will both be set to the value provided by the values option.

sorter

If it’s Falsey then no sorting will occur.

If it’s Truthy then the values are sorted.

If it’s a callable, then the values are sorted and sorter is used as the second argument to the python sorted function.

as_set

Say whether to remove duplicate values before we work out the alias and url for each value.

sort_after_transform

Whether to sort after or before we determine the alias and url for each value.

For example:

section = Section().configure(''
    , target = 'nlsBase'
    , alias  = 'NewsLetters'
    )

ye = section.add('\d{4}').configure(''
    , target = 'newsYear'
    , match  = 'year'
    , values = V(
        lambda _ : [date.year for date in News.objects.dates("pubDate", "year", "DESC")]
      , as_set = False
      )
    )

item = ye.add('\d+', name="newsitem").configure(''
    , target = 'newsItem'
    , match  = 'item'
    , values = V(
        lambda (r, parent, p) : News.objects.filter(pubDate__year=parent[-1]).order_by('-pubDate')
      , lambda _, value : (value.pk, unicode(value))
      , as_set  = False
      )
    )

item.add("example1").configure(target="example")
item.add("example2").configure(target="example")

This here will be used by the menu generation to produce a menu structure that looks like:

2012
    News Item 1
        example1
        example2
    News Item 2
        example1
        example2

2011
    News Item 3
        example1
        example2
    News Item 4
        example1
        example2
    News Item 5
        example1
        example2

Depending on the values in the database table being used here.

Note

CWF doesn’t implement any kind of caching yet, so these functions will be called every time the menu is generated.

Promoted Sections

CWF provides the promote_children configuration option for saying that the child of a section should appear in the menu at the same level as that section.

So for example, say we want to have common settings grouped but keep everything at one level:

section = Section().configure(''
    , target = 'base'
    )

group1 = section.add("group1").configure(
    , module="webthing.groupone"
    , promote_children=True
    )
group1.add("one").configure(target="one")
group1.add("two").configure(target="two")

group2 = section.add("group1").configure(''
    , module="webthing.grouptwo"
    , promote_children=True
    )
group2.add("three").configure(target="three")
group2.add("four").configure(target="four")

Then we’ll get a menu that looks like:

one
two
three
four

Instead of:

group1
    one
    two
group2
    three
    four

Note

Currently there is a limitation that sections that promote their children are unable to contribute to the url and therefore, children of these sections cannot use the values used by the parent section.

Creating the menu

You use the cwf.views.menu:Menu class to generate the menu system from a section for a particular request.

from cwf.views.menu import Menu

def my_view_function(request):
    menu = Menu(request, request.section)

    # Add menu to your template context
    # And do everything else as normal

Note

If you add your views using Section, then the view you provide will be wrapped in a function that attaches that section to the request object before calling your original view

Then in your template:

# For the global navigation
{% include "cwf/menu/base.html" with menu=menu.global_nav children_template="cwf/menu/base.html" ignore_children='True' %}

# For the side navigation
{% include "cwf/menu/base.html" with menu=menu.side_nav children_template="cwf/menu/base.html" %}

To understand how to make these templates available and how to customise them , you should read the section on Templates.