How do I create a navigation menu for different pages in SDL Tridion?

Question

I have created different pages for all these categories: books, mobiles, comp, etc. Now I want to put this type of navigation menu (as shown in figure) in all pages and opening a page should highlight the corresponding menu link.

Should I create a schema which contains text and a link and make it multivalued? So then I create a component and finally render them in all pages?

If not please suggest any other better approach to do so.

Answer 1

The most common way to generate any navigation in Tridion is to simply generate it in a C# template based on the Structure Groups and Pages.

For example a breadcrumb trail can be easily generated from within a template (either a C# fragment or a class implementing ITemplate) by something like this:

var pageDocument = package.GetByType(ContentType.Page).GetAsXmlDocument();
var current = new Page(pageDocument.DocumentElement, engine.GetSession());
var breadcrumb = page.Title;
while (current.OrganizationalItem != null)
{
    current = current.OrganizationalItem;
    breadcrumb = current.Title + " > " + breadcrumb;
}
package.PushItem("breadcrumb", 
                 package.CreateStringItem(ContentType.Text, breadcrumb));

The above fragment really only shows how to navigate the hierarchy of structure groups upwards. You'll still have to make every structure group as a link, probably by looking at PublishUrl property of every StructureGroup.

I know you were not asking about a breadcrumb trail, yours looks more like a leftnav. But the approach for all navigation elements is similar: traverse the relevant Pages and StructureGroups using the TOM.NET in your ITemplate and generate your navigation HTML from that.

To get a list of all the Pages in the current StructureGroup (and mark the current one), I'd expect something like this:

var pageDocument = package.GetByType(ContentType.Page).GetAsXmlDocument();
var current = new Page(pageDocument.DocumentElement, engine.GetSession());
var sg = (StructureGroup) page.OrganizationalItem;
string result = "<ul>";
foreach (var page in sg.GetItems())
{
    result += (page.Id != current.Id) ? "<li>" : "<li class='selected'>";
    result += page.Title;
    result += "</li>";
}
result += "</ul>";
package.PushItem("siblings", package.CreateHtmlItem(result));

Please also see this great example from Nick where he generates an entire sitemap. That is closer to what you'll need in the end, but is of course a lot more code (too much to reproduce here). Albert also shared some of his experience with this approach and mentions the alternatives.