topic a confusing trail of breadcrumbs in Alfresco Archive

a confusing trail of breadcrumbs

gautham_hegde — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:07:57 GMT

I was playing around with the system and noticed something strange about the breadcrumbs behaviourlets assume I have two folders(spaces) under company home >training >testand I visit both of them in series so that they are displayed in the recent spaces list. After visiting them, i go int

Re: a confusing trail of breadcrumbs

steve — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 15:20:38 GMT

Hello,

The breadcrumb trail displays a path of where you have been, in a true 'Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb' sense - it locates the current webpage in the context of a navigation path that you have been along.

It is dynamic in that any given page will show a different breadcrumb trail based on how the user reached the page. This is important because there may be more than one way to reach the page and as such there may be multiple 'direct' paths back to the Root space.

Hope this helps,

Steve

Re: a confusing trail of breadcrumbs

nicolasb — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 15:45:43 GMT

Hello,

No treeview, but a true 'Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb'. How can a user know where he is browsing ?

How can a user distinct two folders with the same name but with a different path ?

company home>test is folder /company home/test or folder /company home/training/test ?

Ok, there may be more than one way to reach a folder but displaying a path will be less confusing.

Re: a confusing trail of breadcrumbs

gabuzomeuh — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 16:12:39 GMT

The breadcrumb is, to my mind, a bit confusing :

I thougth it displays the path where I am but in fact it looks displaying a sort of mix of path and history…
Difficult to know what the breadcrumb displays exactly after a 10 minutes session : a path to a folder really existing or a concatenation of folder and shortcuts….

Re: a confusing trail of breadcrumbs

gautham_hegde — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 16:58:09 GMT

Lets assume that this is the expected behavior….although I think you should give it some more thought, considering its going to be fairly confusing to the end user…..how would I customize it so that it just displays the direct path to root? I dont mind coding it, so if you have any direct pointers to something I have to change, please let me know. In the meantime I will go look around the code myself. Thanks!

Re: a confusing trail of breadcrumbs

csiege — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 15:17:22 GMT

Bump…

I agree the current breadcrumb implementation is confusing to the end user…

It would be nice it we could at least configure the system to show the "'direct' path back to the 'root'" breadcrumb… in 1.4? 🙂 !!

thanks.

Chris

Re: a confusing trail of breadcrumbs

stk137 — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 20:07:24 GMT

I agree that the current (2.1) implementation of Breadcrumbs is confusing and dysfunctional.

First off, it's not a true breadcrumb trail.
If you navigate to A then B then C then A
The breadcrumbs should be
A > B > C > A
not
A

In practice you may have to keep track of just the last 10 or so nodes and push the older ones of the trail, but it'd still make much more sense. You can just put "…" at the front of the trail after you start dropping off nodes.

It should be labeled as a Breadcrumb trail (e.g., "Your Trail:" if it stays where it is. Given it's location at the top of the screen people probably expect it to be a tree path/URL like file explorers and web browser unless indicated otherwise. Without knowing it's a trail the use of">" could suggest a tree path.

I think there should be a tree path visable at all times, as well, if URLs can't be made to do this. Although if I had my choice, I'd rather have bookmarkable URLs which indicated location (like Plone, et al). I frequently have no idea where I am and have to go view details to figure it out.

Re: a confusing trail of breadcrumbs

gavinc — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:21:32 GMT

The breadcrumb is now configurable, if you get a nightly build from the last week you will now be able to configure it to show the 'location' rather than the 'path', this wiki page shows the config needed: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Simple_Customisations#Changing_Breadcrumb_Mode

Re: a confusing trail of breadcrumbs

gilles — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:07:35 GMT

Hi Gavin,
We are using a 2.9.0 B, and the 'location' breadcrumb don't work. Can you tell us the build nr of the feature?
Thank you,
Gilles

Re: a confusing trail of breadcrumbs

davidd — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:22:56 GMT

Yeah, I tried this config change on "Version: Community Network - v2.9.0 (B 683)" this morning and it did not work at all -
the breadcrumbs still displayed their confusing "history" mode rather than a path.

I agree with the most above who suggested that the history mode should have a label displayed on-screen so the user can see what the breadcrumbs mean - it's very counterintuitive by default.

Re: a confusing trail of breadcrumbs

mabayona — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:45:58 GMT

I´m using 2.9C_dev and the "location" breadcrumb works OK. Not sure when it was introduced in the 2.9x series thought.