[opencms-dev] Best practices question - how to determine where you are in directory heirarchy

[Thomas, Cord]

Hello all, I have a best-practices/how are people doing this question:

 

I have a corporate web publishing hierarchy that looks like this:

 

Corp

   Division

      Department

 

Then, for each department I want to have a list of active projects,
staff and calendar links.  I have set up this structure:

 

  Departments

     Department XYZ

        Projects

           Project A path

               Document X

               Document Y

           Project B path

               Document 1

               ...

        Staff

           Staff A profile (jsp reads from db)

           Staff B profile (jsp reads from db)

        ....

 

 

Question - in my CMS templates, if a user clicks on the link to see
Project A documents, I still want the system to know that I am in
department XYZ and if a user clicks on the link to Staff A profile, I
want all other modules to know that I am in Department XYZ.  The
fundament issue is, where do I tell these varying depth navigation
layers how to find the parent they should look to to figure out how to
get the listing of documents in their path?  That is to say, the module
that lists the Project A paths should still know how to list those
things for Department XYZ when a user has clicked on the staff profile
A.

 

I have two thoughts:  

  each document carries an attribute "root-depth" that tells it the root
depth - this seems like a management headache I would like to avoid

  develop a function that steps back through the CmsResource.getPath()
until it finds what it thinks should be that module's root path

 

is there a better approach?  How are other people dealing with this?

 

Cord

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