Forum .LRN Q&A: Context Bar in .LRN?

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
.LRN disables the context bar by default. I find this fairly inconvenient if I'm deeply rooted within my package and cannot go back easily because of lack of context bar.

How do people deal with this in real installations? Is noone bothered by this? What is the suggested way for a package to deal with the missing context bar, have a context bar of it's own ?

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2: Re: Context Bar in .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Nima Mazloumi on
I also realized that it was missing after our test upgrade. I find it very inconvenient if the context bar is missing. How is it activated again anyway?
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Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on
sitemap->main site->ShowContextBarP

yes, we found also inconvenient to hide it, but actually also highly confusing to show it in Galileo's case due:
1. very large class names lead us to very unusable large context bars
2. a subject can only belogn to one department, which is not the case for a lot of classes, this confuse the students.

So, we are taking actions:
1. we already support class name / URL by "key" rather than by course name
2. working to allow a subject belong to more than one department.

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4: Re: Context Bar in .LRN? (response to 3)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
The Parameter ShowContextBarP is set. Sadly it does not work. My assumption is it has something to do with the new design and a bug in dotlrn-master.tcl, but I can't investigate it now.
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Posted by Dave Bauer on
I think a reasonable compromise would be to show the context bar for the elements under a certain class.
This would eliminate the exceedingly long context bars that make it unusable, but would allow local navigation within the current class.
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6: Re: Context Bar in .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Grumet on
I'm pretty sure I used stylesheet "display: none;" to hide it in the new tabbed layout. Let me check.
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7: Re: Context Bar in .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Grumet on
Yes, in dotlrn-master.css, there's a CSS block that looks like this:

#breadcrumbs {
display: none;
}

Delete it and the breadcrumbs should re-appear.

This wasn't a bug -- it was intentional. I was aiming to duplicate the Sloan design, and Sloan doesn't display the breadcrumbs.

Dave's proposal is interesting.

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8: Re: Context Bar in .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Nima Mazloumi on
Is there anyway to limit what is displayed in the context bar?

At present I get dotlrn (/) --> dotlrn (/dotlrn) --> department --> subject --> class

but I only want to display class for instance.

How is the context bar created and how can I remove the first couple of entries or add new?

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9: Re: Context Bar in .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Grumet on
Since it's confusing to have two ways to toggle the context bar, I've removed the stylesheet block. So, as before, the context bar will be on by default, but hideable via the ShowContextBarP parameter of the main subsite. The change is committed on oacs-5-1 and will appear in .LRN 2.1.1, due out today or tomorrow.
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10: Re: Context Bar in .LRN? (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Grumet on
dotlrn::user_context_bar appears to do the trick. There's a disclaimer about it only being tested in classes and communities. I've put it into dotlrn-master.tcl on my local checkout and am testing it.