Question

Store/track the section on a page user has visited.

0

Hi All, It would be great if anyone could help with below problem which we are trying to solve. We have many big pages in our application. For those big pages, we have a requirement where in we need to track which section of the page user is on. Once the user navigates to some other page and comes back to this page, they should be get navigated/scrolled to the section of the page where the user was before they navigated to some other page. Here basically we will need to store the section or div the user has visited, but how can we store that as we don't have any event to trigger on visit of a div or container which would help us in doing so. Can anyone suggest what can we do to solve this ?

asked 2024-03-30

Sarang Patil

1 answers

Ron de Vries · Answer 1 · 2024-03-30

Navigating to sections within a page may be possible with magic that I do not know about, but I believe it could be done with JavaScript interacting with the page's DOM. JQuery is probably involved. Hopefully, someone in the forum who knows how that would work (or not) will also answer or call me full of it, which is also fine :-).

However, tracking where the user was on a page can be done with a non-persistent entity and then posting flags in the NPE by means of OCH MFs or NFs as the user works in the page.

What might be better, though, is not to buck the core behavior of Mendix pages, but rather to go back to popping up page sections so you can control them in the context of what you want to be done in the larger page navigation. Alternatively, you could pop in full-screen pages underneath a header section that always stays visible while you replace the page sections below. Mendix has some built-in step tracker UI elements that could tell the user where they are in a total sequence of steps that you want them to complete.

In general, there are many ways to use what Mendix allows you to do. My experience is that trying to do things that it does not natively support is a path to maintenance hell and impossible state management logic, which will cause a lot of pain going forward as you need to maintain that with the inevitable changes that are always coming next.