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Resolve navigation and authorized menu context

NavigationContext is the only type in this library that reaches a database. On construction it loads the current user's authorized menu items from Oracle through SAIF.Business.Menu, then answers all subsequent navigation and authorization questions (current page, item lookup, sequence, menu membership) purely from the in-memory authorized set.

Field Value
Operation ID OP-CORE-006
Trigger Construction of a NavigationContext for a signed-in user, then per-request navigation queries
Inputs User ID (inUser), MENU_ENVIRONMENT app setting, HttpContext.Current.Request.ApplicationPath / RawUrl
Outputs clsMenuAuthorizedItem instances, menu item sequence numbers, menu-membership booleans
Primary components NavigationContext (constructor, GetItem, GetCurrentItem, GetCurrentPage, GetItemSeq, IsMenuItem)
Entry point SAIF.Presentation.Web.Core.Infragistics111/NavigationContext.vb

Steps

  1. Construct clsMSOracleDataLayer with the fixed DB user name MENU and the environment name read from the MENU_ENVIRONMENT app setting. (BR-CORE-017)
  2. Obtain an IDataPortalInfo from the data layer (m_DAL.DataPortalInfo()).
  3. Call clsMenuAuthorizedItemCollection.GetMenuAuthorizedItems(dpi, user.Trim.ToUpper) to load the authorized menu items for the user. (BR-CORE-018, BR-CORE-019)

  4. Origin: The SQL that retrieves the authorized items executes inside SAIF.Business.Menu (local project reference), not in this library. See that library's operations/resolve-navigation-and-authorized-menu-context.md-equivalent page for the retrieval logic.

  5. On first access, ApplicationCodes / MenuCategories lazily load and cache the active application codes and menu category codes in Static locals. (BR-CORE-020)

  6. Origin: Delegates to clsApplicationCodeCollection.GetActiveApplicationCodes and clsMenuCategoryCodeCollection.GetMenuCategoryCodes in SAIF.Business.Menu.

  7. Each collection is fetched once per process; subsequent calls reuse the cached value.
  8. For lookups, resolve the current application code by stripping / from Request.ApplicationPath and matching it with ApplicationCodes.ItemByAppPath.
  9. If no application code resolves: return Nothing / 0. (BR-CORE-021)
  10. For GetCurrentItem / GetCurrentPage, derive the page link from Request.RawUrl.Substring(Request.ApplicationPath.Length + 1).
  11. Attempt an exact match first (ItemExact / FindPageExact).
  12. If no exact match: fall back to the fuzzy match (Item / FindPage). (BR-CORE-022)
  13. GetItem with inAnyApp = True bypasses application-code scoping and searches by category across all applications. (BR-CORE-023)

Process flow

The following diagram visualizes this operation's control flow.

flowchart TD
    Start([NavigationContext constructed]) --> S1[New clsMSOracleDataLayer MENU, MENU_ENVIRONMENT]
    S1 --> S2[Obtain IDataPortalInfo]
    S2 --> S3[GetMenuAuthorizedItems trim/upper user]
    S3 --> S4{First access to ApplicationCodes/MenuCategories?}
    S4 -->|Yes| S5[Load and cache in Static locals]
    S4 -->|No| S6[Reuse cached collections]
    S5 --> Query([Ready for navigation queries])
    S6 --> Query
    Query --> Q1{App path resolves to a code?}
    Q1 -->|No| Nothing([Return Nothing / 0])
    Q1 -->|Yes| Q2{Exact link match found?}
    Q2 -->|Yes| Exact([Return exact match])
    Q2 -->|No| Fuzzy([Fall back to fuzzy match])

Failure and edge-case behavior

  • NavigationContext never re-validates that the supplied user name matches the authenticated identity — that responsibility sits with callers.*
  • When the application-code cache and the authorized-item set disagree (e.g. after a code is deactivated mid-process), stale application codes persist until a process recycle. (BR-CORE-020)

Sources

  • SAIF.Presentation.Web.Core.Infragistics111/NavigationContext.vb