Navigation Implementation: INavigation vs Repository and Kentico Tag Helper

2025/01/02 5:59 AM

I have been reviewing the official Kickstart Project documentation for implementing navigation using the INavigation interface and NavigationService. However, I am facing issues with the approach provided in the documentation. In the sample project "Dancing Goat," navigation is implemented using a repository, which seems like a different approach. Could someone help clarify which method is more reliable? Is the repository-based method from "Dancing Goat" a more practical solution, or should I focus on implementing navigation with INavigation and NavigationService as described in the documentation?

Additionally, I noticed that in the "Dancing Goat" example project, the navigation is rendered using the <vc:navigation-menu /> tag, while in Kentico, there is a tag helper implementation like <vc:navigation-menu navigation-menu-code-name="MainNavigation" />. The latter uses the navigation-menu-code-name attribute to specify the code name of the navigation menu. Can someone explain how this tag helper works in Kentico? What is the significance of the navigation-menu-code-name attribute, and how does it affect navigation rendering in Kentico?

Answers

2025/01/02 10:45 AM
Accepted answer

The examples in DG or other public code repos and the tutorial which can be found here
https://docs.kentico.com/tutorial/developer-tutorial/implement-navigation
show only suggestions and one possible way to implement a navigation.

There is not that one way which is the correct one.

XbyK is a standard dotnet application and all navigation rendering technologies can be used here.

In the past I used dynamic navigation, which creates the menu items from the content tree dynamically and could be controlled via some properties in the page types. I did this because it was the common way in historic Kentico projects of the past.

Today I prefer to use a repository for menu items as well.

In most projects the dynamic way was insufficent and leads to hacky entries in the page tree to get links to external pages or media content. In addition the most pages should be excluded from the navigation, so we do all this overhead of configuration and dynamic detection for only a few pages.
If you use a repository, content editors will have to set the navigation explicit in addition to content pages but can also add all kinds of links which they would like to have here. I think this is the most userfriendly way to achieve navigation in XbyK from my perspective.

To answer your question: I guess the codename is used to identify the navigation items from the content NavigationMenu content type documents. You can add multiple navigation menus for different locations (main navigation, side navigation, etc.).
You can find more details in the github repository: https://github.com/Kentico/xperience-by-kentico-kickstart/blob/main/src/Kickstart.Entities/ReusableContentTypes/NavigationMenu/NavigationMenu.generated.cs

But at the end it depends on your project, your needs, used frameworks and your client how this is implemented best.

Hint: always implement caching for navigation items.

2025/01/02 7:44 PM

Rahul,

While the official kickstarter may be official, it can be somewhat far from a real "starting point" site.

You may want to check out the Xperience by Kentico Baseline project, this is the open source community turn-key solution that includes pretty much every core thing you need for a website, all set to go. You can reach out to me if you want me to show you around, i'm still working on documentation, but installation is pretty easy!

KenticoDevTrev/XperienceCommunity.Baseline: Core Systems, Tools, and Structure to ensure a superior Kentico Website that's easy to migrate, for Kentico Xperience 13 and Xperience by Kentico

In it, there is a Navigation module, that gives you a Navigation Page Type that comes complete with:

  1. Mega Menu (Widget) support
  2. Automatic Navigation (Select the web page and it will handle the rest)
  3. Manual Navigation (enter text, link, etc)
  4. Dynamic Navigation (an entry point that you can customize and generate your own Navigation Items for it's children)

All you really need to do is overwrite a couple views with however the navigation HTML is structured for your template.

This is just one of the many features of the Baseline.

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