Navigation History Tridion GUI Extension
Ah! its Friday! And what better way to celebrate this day than with a nice GUI extension?
So here is my latest extension available for you to enjoy…
With 2011, the GUI received a new breadcrumb control which is a very useful way to quickly orient yourself of where you are in the system and making it easy to climb up the specific hierarchy you’re currently drilling through.
Of course, those of us who use Tridion know that we usually jump from one location to another, spanning over different publications and sections within publications. For those cases, if we want to go back to a location we were working on before we need to locate it again in the tree, which can be quite a hassle. Especially in large environments.
So my extension will hopefully make it even simpler to work within the GUI in the manner I just specified.
This extension adds 2 new buttons to the GUI right next to the breadcrumb. The buttons mimic the behavior of the browser keeping track of the places(folders, structure-groups, etc.) a user visits.
Its quite simple really. Anytime you click or navigate to a different location within the GUI a new entry will be added to the history list. When you click the back button 
you’ll be taken to the last place you visited and the entry will be moved to the forward list so you can go forward as well by clicking the 
button. Just like in the browser.
By right clicking on one of the buttons you will be able to see the entries stored in either the history or forward lists:
As can be expected (at least I think it can), the Navigation History extension makes use of the Extensions Manager to control some of its behavior.
The extension lets Administrators disable the functionality if needed so it will not be loaded and also control the number of items stored in the history list. By default this is 12 items. Don’t worry if you don’t have the Extensions Manager available, this extension will work without it just as well.
As you may have noticed the Navigation History is not actually an extension on its own but instead I’ve made it a part of the List Quick Helper extension.
Download
If you’d like to take this extension for a spin, the code can be downloaded here.
Update: A newer version of the helper is available on this page.
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Hi Yoav,
I simply love it!
Asier
Another way of accomplishing this is simply making the back and forward buttons of your browser work. Tridion already updates the URL if you click those buttons, so all that is required is to hook into the changes and update the GUI.
The oneliner above shows how to do that in e.g. Chrome. Paste it into the JavaScript console of Chrome and watch how then suddenly your back and forward buttons do what they were meant to do.
It’s easy to make it work on all browsers, but it wouldn’t have fit in 140 characters anymore then.
Thanks Frank, I thought about implementing this way, i was surprised in the first place that we didnt already have this in the product when indeed the GUI does actually change the URL for every location.
Implementing the buttons was more fun though and I like the way i did the history view (right-click) better than the way browsers do it