I realize that this may be a religious war…. but it is increasing difficult to keep all the menu/navigation options in sync and functioning, and I wonder if it might be time to boil it down to just one.
The Tree menu is the one that is on by default in 4.0 and is therefore the one that has the most recent changes and reports. So I’m suggesting the we drop the other options and simplify the code. There is a stuff missing from the other menu’s and the reports has stuff that is not in the Tree … as well as the new titlebar option bugs that only manifest in the Radio Button menu.
left_nav.php is kind of hard to deal with due to the multiple menu models, the pop-ups and the customer specific stuff. Long term I think we should move the menu content to a table and have the menu generated completely on the fly and under the control of the admin user. The layout based forms model seems to be possible basis for this. This might allow for some cool ajax menu add-ons or style changes as well.
1. For obvious reasons, don’t go throwing away options without doing some surveying of users first.
2. I don’t have any clients still using the original layout, but some other folks may be. I do have one using the radio button layout.
3. The radio button layout and tree layout are similar in many respects, and it does not seem very difficult to retain both. The original layout is the one that is most unique and with little to recommend it.
4. Regardless of the above, functions (both PHP and JavaScript) can and should be created to abstract out the differences. This will solve the problem for most new code.
I just switched my last client off Radio Button, and I agree that abstracting would allow for the support of multiple options, including the Radio, all though the sub-menus (like reports) don’t fit well with the radio button style, so that will take some thought.
-tony
We have been using the default view (menu at the top) since OpenEMR 2.83. The reason for that choice was the added screen real estate for users with smaller displays (i.e. 17 inch). Looks like its time to start prepping for transitioning the end users to tree view.