possible to keep selection when loading a new page?

[oliverbarnes]

Hello Christian,

I'm using the plugin on a navigation menu, and at the end leaf I have a link to a new page, which once loaded also has the widget. Is there a way to make the navigation selection stick when this page loads?

I have limited knowledge of jquery, but if you show me the way i can try to implement it :)

Thanks for the great plugin, btw.

• Oliver

[christianyates]

Oliver,

It's definitely possible. I did this for an application I incorporated the plugin into. My tactic was to use HTML 5 storage (http://www.jstorage.info/) to save the current menu structure on each click, so that it could be rebuilt when the menu is reinitialized. On most browsers, that can even persist after closing a window or restarting the browser itself.

I'll have to see if I can dig up some sample code.

[oliverbarnes]

great, that's a good starting point already. Going to look into it tomorrow. Thanks man, and of course if you find some samples, that would be amazing as well :)

[oliverbarnes]

Hi again Christian, I'm starting on this today. I think I understand the process of saving the menu tree when clicking on a link, but here's one question that just popped up: what if somebody arrives at a page through a direct link?

Right now the only way I can see would be to store all links as keys and then the necessary menu structure as values assigned to them, which of course is clunky as hell and not very dynamic :)

I imagine you came across this problem in the application you mentioned?

[christianyates]

That's a tough problem to solve and it gets worse depending on the depth of the tree. You could store the state in the location.hash, but you'll end up with awfully long URL strings. I didn't actually deal with that problem - if someone entered the application without history, they just got the default state.

[oliverbarnes]

I see, will leave it for now then. Thanks for all the help!

[oliverbarnes]

trying to do it like this:

https://gist.github.com/932207

right now I'm hitting a scope snag, can't find a way to use $.jStorage from within the function I'm passing to the 'preview' option

[oliverbarnes]

nevermind, I can get to $.jStorage now - but for some reason the variable set isn't persisting? I tried adding a test with just a key to a string, but that isn't accessible after the click:

https://gist.github.com/932207

[oliverbarnes]

hey man, hope you don't mind me posting repeatedly here, I'm a bit on the dark on this as there aren't any other references online :)

slowly making progress: just got jstorage to actually persist the saved nav, at least on Firefox (for some reason I can see it on safari's + chrome's console yet).

The problem now is replacing the nav with the saved one, I'm getting a "Node cannot be inserted at the specified point in the hierarchy" code: "3".

updated the gist: https://gist.github.com/932207

[oliverbarnes]

(updating the thread with what I posted on skype)

I've gotten as far to saving the inner-html on jstorage (it won't save the actual jquery object, only data), and so I'm able make the nav keep the selected state

https://gist.github.com/932207

but then the other links are dead, so it's not possible to continue clicking-through the nav. Wonder if there's a simple solution here than processing the replacement tree again

[oliverbarnes]

Hey Christian, managed to get it working on webkit browsers, but its barfing on IE 8 (stack overflow when saving the active nodes). Heres the updated gist that tries to check for IE and an alternative way to access the active elements:

https://gist.github.com/932207

Did you have any problems with columnview and IE 8 by any chance? It seems on IE the active and inpath nodes arent accessible for some reason.