Custom breadcrumbs in Confluence plugin

5th part in Confluence plugin development series..
Often pages in plugin have hierarhical structure, so if you for example have 2 pages - Departments and Edit Department, it's preferred that your visotors may navigate fast within these pages. The goal may be achived with a help of top navigation bar, but unfortunatelly confluence only provides backlink to Dashboard:

But what you really prefer is:

The idea is to create your own breadcrumbs content tag.

create new file breadcrumbs.vm in your departments directory:

#requireResource("confluence.web.resources:yui-core")
#requireResource("confluence.web.resources:ajs")
#requireResource("confluence.web.resources:breadcrumbs")
<content tag="breadcrumbs">
 <ol id="breadcrumbs">
  <li><span>#dashboardlink ()</span></li>
  <li>&gt;</li>
  <li><span><a href="$req.contextPath/
   admin/departments/observe.action ">Departments</a>
  </span></li>
  <li>&gt;</li>
  <li><span>Edit Department</span></li>
 </ol>
</content>

include this file in the end of your page:

  ...
  #parse
   ("/templates/userinfo/departments/breadcrumbs.vm")
 </body>
</html>

More extended example may dynamically load action names and URLs. The following code uses i18n for action names in breadcrumbs:

breadcrumbs.vm looks like this:

#requireResource("confluence.web.resources:yui-core")
#requireResource("confluence.web.resources:ajs")
#requireResource("confluence.web.resources:breadcrumbs")
<content tag="breadcrumbs">
 <ol id="breadcrumbs">
  <li><span>#dashboardlink () </span></li>
  <li>&gt;</li>
  #set ($parentClass = $action.getParentClass())
  <li><span><a href="$req.contextPath/admin/
   departments/observe.action">
   $action.getActionName($parentClass.getName())</a>
  </span></li>
  <li>&gt;</li>
  <li><span>
  $action.getActionName($action.getClass().getName())
  </span></li>
 </ol>
</content>

breadcrumbs tag uses action's static function to get parent:

public class EditDepartment 
  extends ConfluenceActionSupport {
 ...
 public static Class<?> getParentClass() {
  return ViewDepartments.class;
 }
 ...
}

After we know parent's class name it's easy to get it's label:

$action.getActionName($action.getClass().getName())

Of course class names must be defined in i18n properties:

userinfo.departments.action.ViewDepartments.action.name=
 Departments
userinfo.departments.action.EditDepartment.action.name=
 Edit department

There are lots of things you can do here, make universal code for any page in your plugin, multi level navigations etc!