Navigation Bar

The navigation bar is a set of horizontal buttons and links that appear at the top of the browser window. The navigation buttons that are presented may be different, according to a number of criteria:

  • Buttons may be made visible / invisible by using security permission keys for user roles
  • The button styles are determined by the user interface theme
  • Different navigation bars may be set up for different roles within the system. With this feature, different navigation bars within the system may also have different button styles for the different roles

The components of the navigation bar are:

  • Your company logo. The company logo image (CompanyLogo.gif) should be sized to fit correctly within your selected user interface theme
  • Navigation buttons. The Home, Help, and Sign Off buttons are always present. The Add, Query, Report, Workspace and Admin buttons are present if the user's current role has permission to see and use these buttons
  • The user’s name with a link to their personal account information
  • A reports list from which the user may execute reports to which they have permission
  • A list from which the user can alter their current role
  • A list from which the user can alter their current business area and / or project
  • A drilldown box into which a user can enter one or more ID's and drilldown into these issues
  • A contextual menubar beneath the main navigation buttons. The buttons that appear on the menubar are dependent upon the page you are visiting. The menubar also has the name of the screen. The position of the buttons and the screen name can be switched with the behavior setting named MENU_BUTTON_POSITION.

To aid the configuration of the navigation bar, there are several behavior settings in the Display category, as follows:

Behavior setting Purpose
NAV_BAR_DRILLDOWN_BOX_STYLE The CSS style to be applied to the table containing the drilldown box on the navigation bar. This is only used when the MENU_DIRECTION is set to HORIZONTAL with horizontal style navigation bars and is used to alter the position of the drilldown box for different styles of navigation bar. Most frequently, you can position the drilldown box in an absolute position on the navigation bar, but you can also use effects such as altering the background-color to change the presentation of the control
NAV_BAR_LOGO_STYLE This style is used to position the CompanyLogo.gif on the navigation bar, when the MENU_DIRECTION is set to HORIZONTAL
NAV_BAR_STYLE This allows you to apply a CSS style to the navigation bar buttons.
NAV_BAR_GO_BUTTON This places a Go button onto the navigation bar by the drilldown box
LOGO_STYLE This is an optional CSS style that is applied to the ExtraViewLogo.gif image on the navigation bar if the MENU_DIRECTION is set to HORIZONTAL.
MENU_TEXT_COLOR This allows you to select the color of text on the navigation bar, to ensure a contrasting color to the background

The following security permission keys control the ability for a user role to edit / alter their access to the options in the title bar:

Menu Bar Entry Control
Account The CF_PERSONAL_OPTIONS controls access to the user’s account details and options. If the user’s role has only read access to this key, then the user name will appear in the title bar, but they are not able to drill down into the personal options screen. Write permission is needed in order to be able to drill down into the personal options screen
Reports The SR_MENUBAR_REPORTS security permission key controls the presence of this entry on the menu bar. It is worth noting that if you have an installation where each user has access to many hundreds of reports, there is a noticeable performance issue in generating this reports menu, each time the user hits a button that navigates to a new screen. In this environment, the recommendation is to turn this permission key off, and have the users reach reports via the Query button on the navigation bar. This one additional mouse click may save them one or more seconds each time they move to a new screen.
Role If the user has only a single role defined, this title bar entry will not appear. If the user may adopt two or more roles, this entry appears and the user can drill down to a screen to alter their current role
Area and Project The security permission keys named CF_AREA and CF_PROJECT control access to whether the user’s role may alter their current business area and project