How do I...?: Cookie Crumbing in Convio

Hiya,

You might take a look at Jakob Nielsen's article about breadcrumbs - you can find it here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html

It discusses the difference between using breadcrumbs for hierarchy vs history - looks like it might be applicable to your question, though it doesn't directly address it.

There's nothing in Convio that automatically creates this from your history. We do keep track of your history within the application mostly for diagnostic purposes if an error occurs, and there are S tags that let you get at the URL of the current page and the title of the current page as well as ways for you to stuff that data into the session and retrieve it later, but I don't think that using any of those would give you the desired results. If you rely on what we maintain in the server, it's not going to track multiple windows or back button usage the same way as the client. For example, if you followed the flow page a, page b, back button page c, you would probably expect your bread crumb to show a->c which is what you navigated whereas on the server, it looks like a->b->c.

I can give you more details about which tags to use to keep track of the server-side history, but I think you will actually get more of what you want using javascript and maintaining it in the client. I'm sure that there are a bazillion examples of how to do that floating around.

Dave

Matthew Andrade:

I would also like to know how to acheive the same effect of the breadcrumb trail. I have the ] tag but that just gives me the title of the current page I would like to show the user where they came from.

I suppose you could use a combination of JavaScript, some Convio conditionals and either U0 or U1 Tags. I don't know what the ramifications would be if you ended up with a long history (U0 and U1 set server session variables which like in any other server-side environment yeilds hits to performace and overhead). I also know U tags aren't documented for a reason.... Still, I think there is probably a way such a mechanism could be put in place, but for performance reasons I doubt it's one Convio would be confortable with being put in place as a hack rather than an engineered solution.

Matthew Andrade:

Thanks Michael,

I have went ahead and am currently using the ] tag along with ] tags. within some conditionals i'm getting what I need out of Convio. It would be nice to have these tags documented with examples of how to use them. I think that would really help those who know nothing about the mysterious tags.

Oh, I agree on the need for documentation, but because T and U tags are pretty low-level functions in Convio... misuse of them can cause serious problems. As such, Convio generally tries to limit their exposure to the wild.