Question

I am developing an Wicket application. But my question is not really Wicket related. In that app I have a horizontal menu. This menu is created by few links. On clicking the link you will be navigated to some page. Now based on the page you are currently viewing the css class attribute of the link of the menu will be changed to “selected”. This is the description of the problem.

Now I am solving this problem by using a integer value. The value is saved in the session and it is updated when any one link has been clicked. Based on that saved value, which link will be “selected”, will be determined at runtime.

I am implementing this in following way:

//On link click I set a number in session

public void onClick() {
    session.setValue(1);// or 2 or 3
}

When the menu is created I switch between the value and modify the css class, as follows:

switch(session.getValue){
    case 1: add css to home;
    case 2: add css to profile;
    // and so on.
}

I was wondering that is this the only right way to do it? Or there some other better techniques or design patterns exist which can help me to achieve this in better way?

Answer 1

Store the menu items in an array (or an ArrayList):

items[0] = home
items[1] = profile

And use the index of the array as menu identifier. When you receive the selected menu itentifier, retrieve the corresponding item with

items[selectedItem]

You could also use a Map if the identifiers are not numbers, or don’t go from 0 to N.