Navbar sub-menus have stopped appearing. (XDPX 12.8)

After minor updates to a website, the navbar submenus no longer display. The mouseover fx still work, but there's no submenu. I created a new dummy navbar by just downloading it and adding a few submenu items, and in previews there is still no submenu display.

This problem has paralyzed my biggest client's main site (http://icon-art.org), and I can't come up with a fix. Any help would be much appreciated. It seems to have happened since the last update done with recent 365 versions.

Thanks in advance,

Allen

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ashtangakasha

After minor updates to a website, the navbar submenus no longer display. The mouseover fx still work, but there's no submenu. I created a new dummy navbar by just downloading it and adding a few submenu items, and in previews there is still no submenu display.

This problem has paralyzed my biggest client's main site (http://icon-art.org), and I can't come up with a fix. Any help would be much appreciated. It seems to have happened since the last update done with recent 365 versions.

Thanks in advance,

Allen

---

Allen, just tried on my copy and all works.
close Xara and re-open with right-click on the application and Run as Administrator.

This usually un-jams such problems.

If happens if you have not completed a machine Restart as old system files are probably still in use.

Acorn

I noticed that the buttons don't work, except for 'Art Radio'. Once I'm on that page, there are four buttons with sub-menus and they all seem to work. It seems that something went wrong with the navigation bar on your Home/Calendar page. Did you open it (edit mode) to see if something is off? If you can't figure it out you could upload your .web/.xar file so that we can take a look at it.

Update: I just created a new document, downloaded a navbar, set up a few submenu items, and then copied & pasted it into the broken XAR file. The pasted
navbar displays the dummy submenus, but the original navbars still don't display submenus.

Thanks. I've run it as Admin, but no change. However, please see my update from 12:24 PM -- the new navbar submenu seems to be working.

This problem with the existing site persists. I'll try a reboot, but this system has been rebooted several times . . . .

Back in a few minutes.

Allen

You're correct -- the other navbars work fine. The site had to be divided into several XAR files, since it got rather large in a few places. The navbar button to the Art Radio page has no submenus, so it works, and Art Radio is in a different XAR file.

The main file (which has the problem) is fairly old -- it's been through monthly revisions for a few years -- so it has probably accumulated some fuzzy spots internally. I dread the thought of rebuilding it from scratch.

What would be really nice is if the current Xara can handle all these pages in one XAR file. Then we could have automatic navbars instead of aligning three (or is it four?) navbars from separate XAR files.

Allen

How many pages are there in the website?

There are about 15 pages. It varies, but usually about that number. They're in 3-4 XAR files. The Archive page is huge, and hit Xara's depth limit. The rest of the site might fit in one XAR file.

UPDATE:

I just examined the new test navbar and the existing broken navbar, and found that when I add submenu items to the broken navbar, it doesn't generate the corresponding Shadow Group in the MouseOver layer.

I'm not sure how to dig further into the navbar mechanism. But I wanted to post this update before continuing to explore.

Allen

UPDATE:

The MouseOff and MouseOver sets of (broken) navbar objects aren't in a shadow group. I'm not sure how that happened, but probably they were mistakenly ungrouped at some point.

How can I reinstate the correct shadow grouping for the two sets of navbar objects? Or more precisely, what is the correct grouping for what now might as well be a completely manually created navbar?

Thanks in advance.

Allen

The Off and Over objects can't be soft-grouped because they are "incompatible." The error msg suggests perhaps they have different anchoring, so I'm exploring that. But I'm wondering if other properties might also produce "incompatible" errors.

Allen

All the buttons in the navbar seem to be at the exact same positioning on both layers. But I still can't soft group them. Back to the manual....

Allen

I looked at the Archive pages but it doesn't seem that they're so big. You could use pop-up layers for the Exhibitions page so you don't have the depth problem. I would try to put it all in one Xara file. The maintenance would be much easier.

UPDATE:

Looks like all the grouping got snaggled up, so I'll have to rebuild the affected navbars. And then try to convince the artist who maintains this site that she needs to be even more careful about touching the navbars.

So the problem is solved, albeit with quite a bit of drudgery left to do.

Any suggestions on how to prevent accidental mods to navbars would be helpful.

Thanks for the feedback,

Allen

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ashtangakasha

Any suggestions on how to prevent accidental mods to navbars would be helpful.

---

See my last post. The complexer your web document, the easier it is to make accidental mistakes when making modifications.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ashtangakasha

UPDATE:

Looks like all the grouping got snaggled up, so I'll have to rebuild the affected navbars. And then try to convince the artist who maintains this site that she needs to be even more careful about touching the navbars.

So the problem is solved, albeit with quite a bit of drudgery left to do.

Any suggestions on how to prevent accidental mods to navbars would be helpful.

Thanks for the feedback,

Allen

---

NavBars are on MouseOff, MouseOver and MouseDown layers so lock these layers and use new layers on top to add other content.
If too radical, just lock the NavBar object itself.

Acorn

Thanks. Will do!

Allen

Thread moved to Xara Web Design Chat forum.