Navigation and menus

Mateu builds navigation declaratively using @Menu.

Instead of configuring menus or routes manually, navigation is derived from your object structure.

Basic idea

• each @Menu field becomes a menu entry
• if the field type contains more @Menu fields, it becomes a submenu
• this process is recursive

Example

@UI("/_control-plane")
@Title("Control plane")
public class ControlPlaneHome {

    @Menu
    ControlPlaneMenu controlPlane;
}

public class ControlPlaneMenu {

    @Menu MasterDataMenu masterData;
    @Menu SitesMenu sites;
    @Menu ReleaseCrudOrchestrator releases;
}

public class MasterDataMenu {

    @Menu EnvironmentCrudOrchestrator environments;
    @Menu LanguageCrudOrchestrator languages;
    @Menu CountryCrudOrchestrator countries;
}

What this produces

A hierarchical navigation tree:

• Control plane
  • Master data
    • Environments
    • Languages
    • Countries
  • Sites
  • Releases

Mental model

Navigation is just your object graph.

• classes define structure
• @Menu defines navigation nodes

Why this matters

In traditional apps, navigation is defined separately:

• routing configuration
• menu configuration
• frontend logic

With Mateu:

• navigation is part of your backend model
• no duplication
• no extra configuration

Works with microservices

Each service can expose its own menu tree.

The shell can compose them using RemoteMenu.

This allows:

• independent UI ownership per service
• unified navigation in the shell