This is a property that all menuObj's share. If it's set, then the menu will not consist of links to pages on the "next level" but rather links to the parent page to the menu, but in addition "#"-links to the cObjects rendered on the page. In other words, the menuitems will be links to the content elements (with colPos=0!) on the page. A section index.

.sectionIndex = [boolean]

If you set this, all content elements (from tt_content table) of "Column" = "Normal" and the "Index"-check box clicked are selected. This corresponds to the "Menu/Sitemap" content element when "Section index" is selected as type.

.sectionIndex.type = "all" / "header"

If you set this additional property to "all", then the "Index"-checkbox is not considered and all content elements with colPos=0 is selected.

If this property is "header" then only content elements with a visible header-layout (and a non-empty 'header'-field!) is selected. In other words, if the header layout of an element is set to "Hidden" then the page will not appear in the menu.

The data-record /Behind the scene:

When the menu-records are selected it works like this: The parent page record is used as the "base" for the menu-record. That means that any "no_cache" or "target"-properties of the parent page is used for the whole menu.

But of course some fields from the tt_content records are transfered: This is how it mapped:

$temp[$row[uid]]=$basePageRow;

$temp[$row[uid]]["title"]=$row["header"];

$temp[$row[uid]]["subtitle"]=$row["subheader"];

$temp[$row[uid]]["starttime"]=$row["starttime"];

$temp[$row[uid]]["endtime"]=$row["endtime"];

$temp[$row[uid]]["fe_group"]=$row["fe_group"];

$temp[$row[uid]]["media"]=$row["media"];

$temp[$row[uid]]["header_layout"]=$row["header_layout"];

$temp[$row[uid]]["bodytext"]=$row["bodytext"];

$temp[$row[uid]]["image"]=$row["image"];

$temp[$row[uid]]["sectionIndex_uid"]=$row["uid"];

Basically this shows that

- the field "header" and "subheader" from tt_content are mapped to "title" and "subtitle" in the pages-record. Thus you shouldn't need to change your standard menu-objects to fit this thing...

- the fields "starttime", "endtime", "fe_group", "media" from tt_content are mapped to the same fields in a pages-record.

- the fields "header_layout", "bodytext" and "image" are mapped to non-existing fields in the page-record

- a new field, "sectionIndex_uid" is introduced in the page-record which is detected by the function t3lib_tstemplate->linkData(). If this field is present in a pagerecord, the linkData()-function will prepend a hash-mark and the number of the field.

NOTE:

You cannot create submenus to sectionIndex-menus. That doesn't make any sense as these elements are not pages and thereby have no "childs".