Even though Catalyst is built on Peoplesoft Interaction Hub / Campus Solutions, the decision was made to not use the delivered pagelet model for the student portal tabs. The main reason was fexibilty. Because we are using custom javascript to render each inside each pagelet, it made sense to make the student tabs one javascript application instead of having multiple / isolated pagelets. This allows us to reuse data across cards. For example, we can easily search all the navigation collections.
In order to make this work, the student portal application is contained in one main pagelet. This pagelet contains cards that make up the student portal experience.
In order to allow students to minimize noise and focus on the content that matters to them, the student portal will allow both navigation and information cards to be collapsed. This is a per device setting that will be persisted using browser storage.
Traditional Interaction Hub / Campus Solution tabs require a full page reload every time a tab is changed. This improvement utilizes javascript to 'hijack' the tabs and simply switch the view embedded in the current tab's pagelet. The benefit to this is that by avoiding a round trip to the server, the page only needs to load the data that is required. Once the data is loaded, the response is instaneous.
###Cross Tab Navigation Search Because all the tabs are virtual, the navigation collections use by each student tab are available for searching. This will allow the student to quickly find the links they are looking for using fuzzy matching.
