How to De-Construct Navigation Buttons Or Bars in WD6?

[jimhanus]

On one WD6 website I'm working on (started as a template in XX5), I have nav buttons made in XX5. There was no attempt to to combine them into a navigation bar, just all separate buttons lined up vertically (see attached photo). In WD6, I can make this into a Navigation Bar by clicking on almost any of the buttons and Arrange>Create Navigation Bar. This starts the nave bar process and makes the entire column a nav bar. But, I've found that for some of the buttons I can click on them and make them into individual nav bars with their own dropdowns, which I would like to do for several of them, just not the whole group of buttons. There shouldn't be anything different about the makeup of each button, all have a mouse-off, mouse-over, and selected states. Is there a way to de-construct a button to determine why a particular button is different from the rest? I can't seem to find any difference.
Thanks.

Jim

[jimhanus]

EDIT: I just noticed that when I open the .web, the nav buttons have little squares in the corners of the ones that will make a complete nav bar of all buttons (see photo 2). The separate ones that I can make into individual nav bars don't. Never noticed this before. What do those squares mean?

[Yellosub]

Maybe your buttons are not all in one and the same group?
Why don't you just delete all buttons apart from the first one, create Navigation Bar
from this one and re-create the other buttons. Could be a quicker solution than looking for a bug in your original bar.

Regards, Hubert

[jimhanus]

I could but I would like to know what I did wrong to cause the effect I did. There's 27 pages and I want to be sure it's right this time.

Jim

[wuerthne]

Check whether all buttons have the same repeating name applied (a name starting "Repeating:"). That is the thing that "Create navbar" looks at in order to select all of them. If the first selected button has a repeating name, then all other buttons with the same repeating name are selected automatically.

If you want to create a bar from just part of the buttons, then the easiest approach would be to remove any repeating names from each of the buttons (click on the "label" icon in the Selector info bar to see applied names).

Then, select just the buttons you want to create your bar from and without there being any repeating names around "Create navbar" will use just the selected buttons rather than trying to enhance your selection.

That only works if all of your buttons are suitable: Each button state must be a group object and the different states must be soft grouped together. Each button in the bar must have the same states (e.g., MouseOff and MouseOver).

[jimhanus]

wuerthne,
That worked perfectly! Some buttons were imported from a template and had the same repeating name so they wanted to stay as one navigation bar. By removing the repeating names I can add individual nav bars (to individual buttons) to the existing navigation without re-doing all 27 pages. As the site keeps evolving it gives me the option of adding links to new pages from the existing nav buttons (see sample attached).
Thank you!

Jim