Top Level Navigation Manipulation in "Hosted Portal"

Question

We are in a position where we have to begin hosting additional content in our portal from a portal that is being decommissioned.
The problem is we need to keep it seperate from the existing content from a user access point of view.
While users can have access to roles from the existing content and from the soon to be "hosted" content, they have not to be seen in the portal at the same time.
For example if the user accesses the portal with URL 1 they only see tabs in the top level navigation for the current content but if they access using URL 2 they only see tabs in the top level navigation for the "hosted" content.
I know we can control most of the issues such hosting raises using URL Aliases in our Desktop Rules to display different desktops, but wanted to know if anyone knows of a simple way that this can be enforced in the standard top level navigation iView via either configuration or simple code change to prevent us having to develop our own TLN to cope with this.
We are currently on EP7.0 SP13
Thanks (and of course points) for any help you can offer.

Answer 1

Hi Micheal,
Thanks for your suggestions.
We have managed to get halfway to our required solution with a very simple change to a copy of the standard top level navigation whereby we only process the PrintNavNodes method for iterations of the "initialNodes" which have the required node names - e.g.
private void PrintNavNodes(IPortalComponentRequest request, IPortalComponentResponse response)
for(Iterator it = initialNodes.iterator(); it.hasNext();)   {
INavigationNode initialNode = (INavigationNode)it.next();
// Start of Change - Portal Share Project
String nodeName = initialNode.getName();
if ( nodeName.endsWith("ccmaint_user")  ||  nodeName.endsWith("ccmaint_supervisor")  ) {
// End of Change - Portal Share Project            
firstContent = PrintNode(initialNode, request, response, 0);
try {
This effectively filters out the unwanted tabs in the desktop where this amended TLN is used. 
This works fine where the tabs you want to see have sort priority putting them at the front of the list but leads to problems when used for the converse set of content as the desktop is still referring to the full "initialNodes" list and so while filtering at this level does render the TLN as required, it becomes unusable as the tab positions are still considered to be as they would be if you had not filtered any.
For example:
We have 5 tabs in total.  For URL 1 we wish to show only tabs 1 & 2.  For URL 2 we want tabs 3, 4 & 5.
Using this method for URL 1 we are fine as Tabs 1 & 2 are in the correct positions but for URL 2 when the tabs are rendered they appear in positions 1, 2 & 3 as required but act somewhat as though they are still in positions 3, 4 & 5 (e.g. Select the first tab and the 3rd is highlighted and a page error occurs - "'children' is null or not an object").
Not only this but the Inner Page still displays the content from the filtered tab 1 as opposed to tab 3.
Can anyone advise a way we can get round these issues?
Thanks
Ian.
P.S. Please excuse my naïvety in this area.
Edited by: I. Butcher on Mar 27, 2008 10:31 AM