Many pages and complex data model in JHS app

Question

I am using JHS to create an application containing data that is structured something like:
- Country
- Company
- Department
- Employee
- Payments Details
I have created entity and view objects corresponding to each of these and the appropriate accessors/view links. We need the user to be able to search, work on data and 'drill down' from any level (not always starting with company). In order to make this possible my JHS application has 5 'top level' tabs corresponding to each of the above entities. From each of these top level pages users can drill down to the children.
This works but we end up with many pages and a large data model with lots of replication and nesting.
Country - 5 pages
Company - 4 pages
Department - 3 pages
Employee - 2 pages
Payments - 1 page
total 15
You can picture how the data model is structured. Obviously this is a very simple example but I hope it illustrates my concerns. We have so many pages that post-generation changes are going to be difficult to manage. I'm also worried about the size and complexity of the data model. In this case views are almost all entity based so I guess the data is only cached once but supposing they were not?
Are we using JHS in the best way ? perhaps I'm overcompilcating it ?
I have started to rewrite the JHS generated application so that it (almost) always reuses the same top level generated pages (with some modifications). When the user wants to navigate to a child I modify the whereClause of the target ViewOjbect appropriately, reexecute it and forward to the corresponding 'top level' page. This approach seems to work well, cuts down the number of pages enormously and simplifies the data model (and has enabled me to put breadCrumbs in).
In doing this though, am I creating work for myself that JSH could have done if we had used it differently in the fist place?

Answer 1

This sounds like a valid approach in your situation. We have been playing with the idea of having something like 'Group Links' where you can generate navigation items from one group to the other. Then, you would need to have one, 5 level deep nested group, and 4 other top level groups to provide the search&select on each of the nested groups, but they themselves would not need to have nested groups, but a navigation link to the nested groups in the 5-level deep group.
Although nice and simple in theory, the details are a bit tricky to work out with all the possible layout- and samePage settings, so we have not implemented this yet. So your approach seems a valid one. If you have any suggestions on a way to generate what you are now doing manually, we'll be interested.
Kind regards,
Peter Ebell
JHeadstart Team