Hey so I'm not sure if this has any easy or good solution, but I figured I'd post here and find out if there's something I'm not thinking of.
Basically we have a bunch of data that's nested in logical groups (not necessarily reflected in the database architecture), and it's being loaded and navigated by way of dynamic ajax loads. Think nested accordions (http://jqueryui.com/demos/accordion/) where each accordion element's content is loaded via an ajax call which loads sub-accordions, that may load sub-sub-accordions via ajax, and so on..
The reason for this is that we are navigating a large volume of content and can't afford to put all of it on the page at once.
So, the question is how to jump directly to an element that is nested sufficiently deep so as not to be on the page yet?
For example: If I wanted to hotlink to a block of content that was 3 levels deep on a page that only has 1 level actually loaded and all I have is the id of the block of content, not the parents. I would need to trigger the ajax load of the correct parents in order to have the element I want. Triggering is easy once you have the path. So how to deduce the path when it is essentially arbitrary in relation to data?
Caching the potential hierarchies of paths is the best we've come up with, but I'd love to find a way to avoid having one more thing to keep current in this system.
Ideas?