6. Menus and navigation

In this chapter, we'll look at navigating between the two dashboards you've created in your app, as well as creating menus at the top level in PhixFlow, and navigating directly to your app via the URL.

First, we'll creating menu items and buttons to navigate between the two dashboards:

Do this in your app. To recap the steps in the video:

• Drag the dashboard Contact Types onto the edit form in the Contacts dashboard - a button will appear
• Drag the dashboard Contact Types into the header of the grid view in the Contacts dashboard - a menu item will appear

Go into App Mode. Try both buttons - both will open the Contact Types dashboard.

Now we'll create a top level menu for the application, and look at how to navigate directly to the application using the URL:

Create a top level menu in your app. To recap the steps in the video:

• Open the repository browser under the application Contacts
• Go to the section Menus, and add a new menu
• You can define a number of different top level menus under an application, but in most cases you only need one - set the Name of the menu to Default
• Add a sub-menu - this will appear in the header of the PhixFlow application
  • Set the Name of the sub-menu to Contact Management
  • Set the Display Name to Contact Management
  • Press Apply
• Add a menu item to open the Contact Types dashboard:
  • Set the Name to Contact Types
  • Set the Action to Contact Types - this is one of the actions that PhixFlow created automatically when you dragged the Contact Types dashboard onto the Contacts dashboard earlier
    
    • Sharing these actions between buttons and menu items is reasonably safe - all they do currently is open a dashboard, it is unlikely that someone will add a lot of extra logic to them later
  • Save your changes to the menu item
• Before adding a menu item to open the Contacts dashboard, you will need to add an action to open the contact dashboard:
  • Open the stream configuration form for Contacts
  • Add a new action
  • Set the Name to Open Contacts - this is an internal name, it is useful to make this as descriptive as possible, to help keep your configuration well organised
  • Set the Display Name to Contacts - this is the name that will appear in the menu
  • Open the section Action Completion
  • Tick Open Post Dashboard, then press Apply
  • Note: you can also set Close Parent Dashboard - this is useful in some workflows, when after moving to a new screen, you want to close the screen that the user started from; in this case, we don't want this, since users will open the list of contact types, edit the list, then close the contact types to return to the contacts
  • Add a Dashboard Rule:
    • Set the Dashboard to Contacts
    • Leave the Expression blank; this means that every time the action is run, we will open this dashboard
      • We want this because we will create a simple button that opens a single dashboard every time it is pressed; if we implement a workflow, we might need something more complex here, to open different dashboards depending on the data being handled
    • Save your changes to the dashboard rule
  • Save your changes to the action
• Open the menu again, and go into the sub-menu Contact Management
• Add a menu item to open the Contacts dashboard:
  • Set the Name to Contacts

  • Set the Action to Open Contacts

Switch to your application by going to the PhixFlow icon in the top left hand corner of the application. Clicking the icon will give you a list of available applications - select Contacts.

You will see your new menu. Check this works by going each to menu item, and checking that the correct dashboard opens.

Look at the URL in your browser. You will see that PhixFlow has appended the name of the application to the base URL. It will also have added a direction to the Default top level menu.

You can grab this URL to share with users of the application, but you can also construct them yourself. The format is:

[base url]?application=[application name]

In this case, something like:

https://hosted.phixflow.com/train/start.html?application=Contacts

(Note that you don't need to put a direction to the Default top level menu at the end of the URL.)

Set the default action on the top-level menu. This action will run when the application is started, and we will use the default action to open the contacts dashboard on application start:

• Open the top level menu (Default)
• Set the Default Action to be Open Contacts
• Save your changes

Refresh the browser page to restart the application - you will see that the Contacts dashboard opens straight away.