Extended
Charles Roth, 27 April 2001

The Joust Outliner is a wonderful (and free!) javascript package by Ivan Peters for producing a Windows-Explorer-like navigation menu tree of complex websites.  (See a sample screenshot.) 

Thanks to Interactive Business Systems, I recently had the need and the opportunity to extend Joust to better handle the display of complex menus, specifically to display continuous dotted navigation lines when long menus "line wrap" in the navigation frame.

I have made my extensions available to the Joust community (which is to say, everyone) as open source (see www.opensource.org), in the hope that others, including Ivan, may benefit and improve on this work.

The current official version of Joust, as of April 2001, is 2.5.4, and is available from Ivan's site at www.ivanpeters.com.  My extensions are available as a modification of Ivan's standard 2.5.4 kit, and thus include both the original and the changed files.  The extension kit is joust254a.zip.  The changes are described in detail in readme254a.txt, which is also included in the kit.

See Ivan's standard Joust sample page, with the extensions applied (opens a new window).  Drag the vertical frame divider left, and watch what happens to the menu tree.

For a more complicated sample, see the NSK site that I'm currently working on.  Mouse over "Bearing ABCs", and click on any selection in the dynamic pull-down.  (We're using the hierMenus from www.dhtmlab.com for the pull-downs.)

There is a discussion thread about this set of extensions, in the Delphi Joust forums, starting at www.delphi.com/joust/messages/?msg=1016.1.  If you have questions or suggestions, please join us there.