Ability for extensions to contribute multiple nav items as a group

[deboer-tim]

Is your enhancement related to a problem? Please describe

After #7759, groups of pages within Podman Desktop can be contributed as nav groups, where the group expands to show a sub-menu, and users can chose which items to add to the main nav or what to hide. Today, extensions can't create groups and have to handle sub-navigation within their own webview.

Describe the solution you'd like

Extensions should be able to contribute multiple webviews with different icons, or a list of subpaths/nav-ids within one webview.

Why?

• The extension wouldn't need to handle menu navigation.
• Navigation is seamless and fits into Podman Desktop's mechanisms.
• As we add other features like the ability to hide items or add individual items to the main nav, the extension benefits.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[benoitf]

Extensions should be able to contribute multiple webviews with different icons, or a list of subpaths/nav-ids within one webview.

An extension can provide multiple webviews (but not customize the icon)

There can't be really subpath in the context of webviews as the html displayed is the one from the webview (the thing registered is not a UI thing) so there is no navigation pattern.

Multiple webviews means different html so I don't know how it would behave from the implementation of an extension. Like multiple chunks for each app ?

[deboer-tim]

Extensions should be able to contribute multiple webviews with different icons, or a list of subpaths/nav-ids within one webview.

An extension can provide multiple webviews (but not customize the icon)

There can't be really subpath in the context of webviews as the html displayed is the one from the webview (the thing registered is not a UI thing) so there is no navigation pattern.

Multiple webviews means different html so I don't know how it would behave from the implementation of an extension. Like multiple chunks for each app ?

Short answer is: I don't know. Contributing icons and being able to tag several webviews as a group would be easy, I agree it's figuring out if there's any way to provide external 'navigation' that may not be possible. Ideally I'd want it to be possible to deliver something like AI Lab as a set of pages and have Podman Desktop manage the nav items (and support show/hide, etc), or move Kubernetes to an extension without having to contribute 6+ frontends.