Menu element | HCL Digital Experience

A menu element displays metadata and content from content items that match the search criteria of the menu element. The search criteria of a menu element can include matching site areas, authoring templates, categories, and keywords.

Creating a menu element

You can use a menu element only by creating a menu component. You cannot add a menu element to authoring templates, site areas, or content items.

Menu search options

Menu element search options are defined in the Menu Component Query section of the menu element form. These search options define which content items from your site are displayed in the menu element. Search options can include a combination of search parameters that include searches based on authoring templates, categories, and site areas.

Menus can search for the following content in a website:
  • Content with matching authoring templates
  • Content with matching site areas
  • Content with matching categories
  • Content with matching keywords

Between different criteria, menu searches are "and" searches, but within each search criteria, menu searches are "or" searches. For example, a menu element that searches for two different categories and an authoring template displays content items that are profiled with at least one of each profile type. Content that matches only one profile type is not displayed.

Menus do not display search results if you select a search criteria but do not enter any search parameters. For example, if the menu is configured to display results that are based on categories, but no categories are specified in the menu form, then no matches are displayed.

Menu sorting options

You can sort menu search results according to following criteria:
  • Content document name
  • Content document description
  • Published date
  • Expired date
  • General date one
  • General date two
  • Last modified date
You can select a maximum of three sort options.

Menu paging options

HCL Web Content Manager provides flexible paging options that are used to display search results that are generated by the menu element.
  • You can specify the number of results that are displayed in a menu page. For example, a menu that is defined to show five results per page would display only five records from the set of search results.
  • You can indicate where in the results set you want to begin showing results by specifying which menu page to use as a starting point. As an example, if you are displaying five results per menu page and you want to show records 6–10, you would start showing search results with the second menu page instead of the first.
  • To provide easier navigation of the search results in a menu, you can include a page navigation element in the header or the footer of the menu element. The page navigation element enables stepping forward or backward through multiple menu pages without the need for creating multiple menu elements to display the different pages.
  • A large number of search results can cause a delay when the menu element is initially rendered. To prevent this delay, you can limit the maximum number of pages of results that are included in the menu. To further improve the efficiency of the menu, you can also specify how many pages of results must be read beyond the current page so that paging performance is not affected by rebuilding the menu.
While a page navigation element is a convenient way of displaying and browsing a menu's search results, you can use the menu's paging options to display search results in other ways. For example, if you wanted to show the results in a 3-column table, you might create three menu elements with the same search criteria and then tailor the paging options of each menu to display different result sets:
Table 1. Example
Menu Results per page Start page Records displayed
Menu element 1: 5 1 1 to 5
Menu element 2: 5 2 6 to 10
Menu element 3: 5 3 11 to 15
The three menus might then be referenced within three different cells of a table row in a presentation template.