PhixFlow Help

11. Menus and Navigation

Owned by Anthony George
Last updated: Dec 08, 2020 by George Backhouse

Create a top-level navigation menu and in-window navigation. To recap the steps in the video:

Create In-window Navigation

  1. Open the Businesses dashboard.
  2. Open the Contact Details Tab.
  3. Drag the ContactManager dashboard onto the header of the grid view Business Contacts. A button will appear.

Go into App Mode to test the new button. It will open the Contact Manager dashboard.

Create a Top-level Menu

Now we'll create a top-level menu for the application.

  1. Open the configuration form for the application ContactManager.
  2. Go to the section Menus, and you will see an existing menu item called something similar to ApplicationMenu. Usually you only need one top-level menu but you can define several if you need them.
    1. Open the ApplicationMenu
    2. Set the Name of the menu to Default.
    3. Click Add a new sub-menu. This will appear in the header of the PhixFlow application. Set:
      • Name: Contacts Manager
      • Display Name:  Manage
    4. Save your changes.
  3. Add Menu Items to open the ContactManager dashboard and set:
    1. Action: ContactManager

Sharing these actions between buttons and menu items is reasonably safe as they simply open a dashboard. It is unlikely that someone will add extra logic to them later.

Create the Action

  1. Before adding a menu item to open the Businesses dashboard, you need to create an action.
  2. Open the stream configuration form for Businesses.
  3. Add a new action and set:
    1. Name: Open Businesses only
      This is an internal name. Aim to make the name as descriptive as possible, to keep your configuration well organised.
    2. Display Name: Businesses
      This is the name that will appear in the menu.
    3. Action Completion:
      • Tick Open Post Dashboard, then Save.
      • Set the Dashboard to Businesses.
      • Leave the Expression blank. This means that every time the action is run, PhixFlow will open this dashboard.

In some workflows it is useful to set Close Parent Dashboard. This option sets the application to close an original dashboard when a user moves on to a different dashboard. 

In this example we simply want to open a single dashboard every time it is clicked. If you want to implement a workflow, you might need something more complex here, to open different dashboards depending on the data being handled.

Create the Menu Item

  1. Open the menu configuration again and add a menu item to open the Businesses dashboard. Set:
    1. Name: Businesses
    2. Action: Open Businesses Only
  2. Apply all changes.

Switch to App Mode. Load your application by going to the PhixFlow icon in the top left corner of the application. Click the icon to list all available applications and select Contact Manager.
You will see your new menu. Check this works by going to each 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 has also added a direction to the default top level menu.

Application URLs

You, or the application users, can navigate directly to the application using a URL. You can either copy the URL from the browser address bar to share with users of the application, or you can construct the URL yourself.

The URL format is:

[base url]?application=[application name]

In this example, the constructed URL is something like:

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

The direction to the default top-level menu at the end of the URL is optional.

Default Actions

Set the default action on the top-level menu. The default action will run when the application is started. For this example, we will use the default action to open the Businesses dashboard when the application starts.

  1. Open the top-level menu.
  2. Set the Default Action to be Open Businesses Only.
  3. Save your changes.

Refresh the browser page to restart the application. You will see that the Businesses dashboard opens straight away.

Next video: 12. Validate Input

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