Creating a dropdown for Roles in Top Level Navigation

Question

Hi,
I am trying to customize the com.sap.portal.navigation.toplevel.par file.
Can anybody please help me to create a dropdown for various roles in the portal,if the user clicks on the first role in the Top Level Navigation ,he should see a dropdown list with worksets of the role.
Any help would be really appreciated
Thanks
Art Tech.

Answer 1

Hello Art Tech,
I hope I understand you right. You want to change the appearance of the custom built TLN according to the currently chosen portal theme, just like the standard TLN would change its appearance.
Well, if so, then there are two ways:
1) The HTML and styles/classes of your custom built TLN are still more or less the same as in the standard or you can at least reuse most of the standard HTML output/structure, then applying a new theme would also affect your custom TLN.
2) You have your own HTML output for the TLN, not relying on anything from the standard TLN, and you most probably work with a custom stylesheet file (e.g. "tln.css"). What you have to do then is to provide a set of TLN stylesheet files for each portal theme you want to support and include it accordingly by retrieving the current theme's name via the ILafService (Look & Feel Service). Or you rely on only one CSS file, then have as many "blocks" of styles (marked with a preceding class selector like in e.g. ".themeNameA ul li a " and ".themeNameB ul li a ") as you have themes, and put a bracket around the TLN-output with class="currentThemeName". For this last approach I give you the sample code (assuming you want to support the themes "SAP Standard", "SAP Tradeshow" and "SAP Chrome"):
The TLN code: tln.jsp
&gt;<%@ taglib uri="NavigationTagLibrary" prefix="nav" %>
&gt;<%@ page import = "com.sapportals.portal.prt.service.laf.*" %>
&gt;<%@ page import = "com.sapportals.portal.prt.runtime.PortalRuntime" %>
&gt;<%
&gt;// include the TLN stylesheet
&gt;response.include(componentRequest, componentRequest.getResource("css", "css/tln.css"));
&gt;
&gt;// retrieve the current theme's technical name
&gt;ILAFService iLAFService = (ILAFService)PortalRuntime.getRuntimeResources().getService(ILAFService.KEY);
&gt;String currentTheme = iLAFService.getCurrentTheme(componentRequest).getThemeName();
&gt;%>
&gt;
&gt;&lt;div class="<%=currentTheme%>"&gt;
&gt;  &lt;ul&gt;
&gt;  <nav:iterateInitialNavNodes>
&gt;    &lt;li&gt;<nav:navNodeAnchor navigationMethod="byURL" />
&gt;    <!-- second level ? -->
&gt;    &lt;/li&gt;
&gt;  </nav:iterateInitialNavNodes>
&gt;  &lt;/ul&gt;
&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
The stylesheet: tln.css
&gt;.sap_standard ul li {background-color:#FFCCCC}
&gt;.sap_standard ul li a
&gt;
&gt;.sap_tradeshow ul li {background-color:#CCCCFF}
&gt;.sap_tradeshow ul li a
&gt;
&gt;.sap_chrome ul li {background-color:#CCCCCC}
&gt;.sap_chrome ul li a
I hope this solves your problems.
Best regards,
Sven Kannengiesser