This Grails plugin is used to easily create menus in administrative panels. It's based on annotating controllers, using custom ShowInNavMenu annotation. A controller can be annotated and you can specify which icon is to be used (e.g. fa-home), as well as order, indicating relative position of that item. It is recommended order of items is specified in large numbers (thousands) for easier rearrangement.
The Nav menu is displayed using the <navb:nav/> tag, from NavMenuBuilderTaglib. This library will generate a menu when first invoked, after which it will cache it.
All controllers and textual contents for menu is gathered in the application initiation phase. This is during Spring's creation of NavMenuContext bean (configured in grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy).
Further improvements:
- Write tests for
NavMenuContext; - Provide
NavMenuContextread and store information on controllers, so taglib wouldn't have to be responsible of extracting it; - Provide integration with (optional) Spring Security Plugin for grails, so menu items are conditionally displayed, based on role of current user and role required for controller execution.
- Provide default icon set used in menus
- Provide additional tooling, such as custom menu builder