To whom it may concern,
I’m in an intership in french company NEREIDE. The subject of the
intership is to create Java objects for OFBiz which would handle
breadcrumbs. Theses objects are meant to help building breadcrumbs on a
page. We thought that adding some of them to the framework could be
interesting and useful for OFBiz development.
BreadCrumbs are pretty useful items, there can help a lot of users to
have a better understanding of what they are manipulating on an
application. That is why nowadays Breadcrumbs are very commons. There a
are a lot of different kinds of breadcrumbs and currently in OFBiz it is
possible to build one for an application but there is no object to help.
There are always developed as specific objects to application whereas a
lot of them have a common pattern.
What I have done within my internship is a solution that ease the
creation process of breadcrumbs. I designed objects meant to support
recurrents patterns. The goal is for the developper to give necessarie
infromation to the adapted object then it delivers through an adapted
format all needed information to print the breadcrumbs on screen. Thus,
some development time is gonna be saved.
For example, in OFBiz the same kind of breadcrumbs are used on
e-commerce or management websites for “Product” entity, showing the
hierarchy of categories. With a breadcrumb object, it is possible to get
all the names and links to build a trail of hyperlinks just by giving
the productId to it. This would avoid re-coding the same kind of
algorithm questioning database to climb hierachy and all cache
management. A breadcrumb object of this kind could be implemented in
standard OFBiz in the product application.
I’ve done several objects for different kinds of breadcrumbs and I’d
like to share them as a contribution to the OFBiz project, and get your
precious feedback.
Regards,
GIBERT Tom
