Sencha Touch’s NestedList is an excellent component for creating the compact “drill-down” effect that we’re all used to on our mobile devices. It’s super-flexible, too. Whether you have a canned set of items, or need to retrieve each “level” via AJAX, it’ll handle it.

I’ve used NestedList quite a bit, and have been generally happy with it. One of the issues I’ve come across, though, is that it does not (as far as I’m aware, at least) support jumping around to arbitrary nodes with the NestedList.

Huh? So here’s an example 😉

Let’s say you have a bunch of products that exist within categories of variable depth. Once you reach the “product” level of your NestedList, you can out-of-the-box call getDetailCard(), build out your detail view, and be done with it. NestedList will take care of the navigation bits, and your site’s visitor will get a nice “back” button to return to the category list they used to get to the detail product.

Fine and dandy. BUT…what if you have links on your detail “card” to related products? Maybe these products exist in the same category, at the same “depth” in the nested list. But maybe instead they are in an entirely different category, More >