When I first started working with my current client their first form was 6 pages (views) and the client wanted the navigation to be semi smart and very easy to use.  When I say semi smart they wanted the navigation to disabled if a user shouldn't have access to a view.  They immediately said the form needed to be browser based and they didn't want the out of box navigation but something that could be easily updated without the assistance of IT.  We all know that User Roles is not support in browser based forms so a new way had to be created.  So I came up with the ideal of doing breadcrumb navigation at the top of the header of each page and creating an AD group for each item in the breadcrumb.  If the user opening the form was part of that AD group then that breadcrumb button was active.  The details if a user was part of an AD group was done with a .NET Web Service, LDAP query code and just a little extra .NET code to make everything work.

To build the navigation I used buttons for the View names and just ">>" for the separators.

Changing the buttons to be flat and a different color was done by selecting the button and then clicking the "Borders and Shading" menu button.













An opening rule was created to query the web service to return what security groups the current user is part of and then set the breadcrumb buttons visibility accordingly by using Conditional Formatting.  The secondary data source has one record with 5 fields and each field represents a button.  The first breadcrumb button is always available and that's why there are only 5 fields in the secondary data source.

As I said before a Conditional Formatting statement is used to disable the breadcrumb button if the matching field is equal to FALSE.  The only piece that took a little extra time was fine tuning of the LDAP query but after that was done then everything else was pretty easy.

The feedback from the client has been pretty positive and I'll probably use it again because it wasn't difficult to setup.  If anyone else has used another way for navigation in a browser based form it would be great to hear about it.  Opinions are always welcome.

Cheers