Question

I have a breadcrumb structure similar to the image above. It displays the progress trail of the forms, the form names and the current page being displayed and it also gives the user a guide to the start and end of the process.

This was originally put together in classic ASP. What would be the best approach to recreating this in MVC 2 – C#

In reply to one of the answers below: I don’t want this to be site-wide, I was looking for a breadcrumb solution for a collection of forms – so for example I might have a set of forms for a complaint or a set for suggestions, etc. So I need to be able to pass the form details into something like a helper or function that will then output a similar result as the image above.

This is the original classic ASP code that generates the trail..

Class BreadCrumb

Private dicCrumbs
Private arrIcons()
Private arrColours()

Public Sub Crumb(Text, Icon)

    dicCrumbs(Text) = Icon

End Sub

Private Sub Class_Initialize()

    Set dicCrumbs = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.Dictionary")

    ReDim arrIcons(2)
    arrIcons(0) = "images/selected-process.gif"
    arrIcons(1) = "images/unselected-process.gif"
    arrIcons(2) = "images/additional-process.gif"

    ReDim arrColours(2)
    arrColours(0) = "#0080C0; font-weight:bold"
    arrColours(1) = "#999999"
    arrColours(2) = "#999999"

End Sub

Public Sub Show()

    Dim strItem, intCrumbs
    %>
    <table style="margin-bottom:10px" class="formbreadcrumbs" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" summary="Bread Crumb Trail">
        <tr>
            <td align="right"><img src="images/left-process30.gif" width="30" height="20" alt=" " /></td>
    <%
    intCrumbs = 0
    For Each strItem In dicCrumbs
        intCrumbs = intCrumbs + 1
        Response.Write "        <td><img src=""" & arrIcons(dicCrumbs(strItem)) & """ width=""25"" height=""20"" alt="" "" /></td>"
        If intCrumbs < dicCrumbs.Count Then
        %>
                <td><img src="images/background-process.gif" width="40" height="20" alt=" " /></td>
                <td><img src="images/background-process.gif" height="20" width="5" alt=" " /></td>
                <td><img src="images/background-process.gif" width="40" height="20" alt=" " /></td>
        <%
        End if
    Next
    %>
            <td align="left"><img src="images/right-process30.gif" width="30" height="20" alt=" " /></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
    <%
    intCrumbs = 0
    For Each strItem In dicCrumbs
        intCrumbs = intCrumbs + 1
        Response.Write "        <td colspan=""3"" align=""center"" style=""color:" & arrColours(dicCrumbs(strItem)) & "; line-height:0.9em; font-size:x-small"">" & strItem & "</td>"
        If intCrumbs < dicCrumbs.Count Then
        %>
                <td></td>
        <%
        End if
    Next
    %>
        </tr>
    </table>
End Sub

End Class

Many thanks for any suggestions/pointers.

Answer 1

If you want a true breadcrumb, you can have a look at the following Question ( How can dynamic breadcrumbs be achieved with ASP.net MVC? )

Other than that, you could pretty much use logic and partial views to accomplish this and display a particular image at a particular point in the workflow from a partial view.

You could also have a look at some clever jQuery
http://plugins.jquery.com/project/jBreadCrumb