One of the greatest challenges to a successful Fluid deployment is Classic navigation and one of the most common solutions to this challenge is the Tile Wizard-based Navigation Collection. Tile Wizard-based navigation collections allow us to build business process-based navigation for our back-office users (back-office pages are primarily Classic). Let's say you have built some amazing Navigation Collections for your back-office users and now you want to drill from one collection or page to a specific target page in another Navigation Collection. You know you can easily craft a URL to a Tile Wizard Navigation Collection, but can you load a specific target component from that Navigation Collection? This is a great question that my PeopleTools Fluid course students ask me often. The answer is Yes!
When using the Tile Wizard to publish a Navigation Collection, PeopleTools uses a special Activity Guide template to display the Navigation Collection. This means that every Tile Wizard-based Navigation Collection is viewed as an Activity Guide. Each link is considered a step in the Activity Guide. Fluid Activity Guide steps have an id attribute called ptgpid. Once we find the ptgpid of a step, we can use that ID in a URL. When the Activity Guide is a Navigation Collection, the step ID is the Navigation Collection CREF Link ID. Note: this is not the base CREF ID, but the CREF link that was created by the Navigation Collection utility. If we inspect the HTML for a Navigation Collection, we can find the ptgpid in the HTML. Alternatively, we can find it in the portal registry under Portal Objects > Navigation Collections. Here is an example from the HTML:
To launch the highlighted item, copy the ptgpid and add the following to the end of the URL:
&ptgpid=<the id goes here>
For example, in the Portal Navigation Collection that is part of the PeopleSoft Developer homepage, appending the following to the URL will navigate directly to the Find Object Navigation item:
&ptgpid=HC_S201604180146095689166800
At jsmpros we believe that navigation is a critical component of a successful Fluid implementation, which is why we devote the first day of our Fluid 1 course to Fluid navigation. To learn more or to schedule a course, visit us online at jsmpros.com.
