a confusing trail of breadcrumbs

[gautham_hegde]

I was playing around with the system and noticed something strange about the breadcrumbs behaviour

lets assume I have two folders(spaces) under company home
   >training
   >test
and I visit both of them in series so that they are displayed in the recent spaces list.  After visiting them, i go into the training folder.  and the bread crumbs display
companyhome >training
as expected, but now if I click on test space in the 'recent spaces' box, I am taken to the test space, but the breadcrumbs display
company home>training>test
instead of
company home>test
as expected.  Granted I visited the test space from the training space, but I would assume that the bread crumbs always display the 'direct' path back to the 'root'.  I have noticed this in many other systems and I believe this is a wrong implementation, but I could be wrong

[steve]

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

[nicolasb]

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.

[gabuzomeuh]

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….

[gautham_hegde]

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!

[csiege]

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

[stk137]

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.

[gavinc]

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

[gilles]

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

[davidd]

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.