Many Cool Focus menus have an optional "sticky" feature that keeps the last-selected menu entry highlighted until the next is clicked. This provides a visual tie between the menu entries and the page displayed in the main frame. As long as the visitor always uses the menu to navigate, he's always got that visual reference.

But what if he uses the browser's Back or Forward buttons? Or if you include hypertext links to your other pages and he clicks one of those? Without Spytracking, the menu's sticky entry won't change and the visual tie between page and menu is gone.

Spytracking is a Cool Focus system that allows the pages on your site to inform the menu of which entry to highlight. Each page you link to from the menu includes a little applet we call a 'Spy'. When the page is opened - by any method - it reports its details back to the menu, and the menu highlights the appropriate entry. The Spytrack system works even if you run the menu from a separate 'satellite' browser window, as we have in the Spytracking Example.

The Spy is less than 2k in size, and (like any applet) only has to be downloaded to the visitor's system once, regardless of how many pages you include it on. It takes just two simple parameters, explained in Using Spytracking.

Although TreeView Professional includes the Spytrack system, you don't have to include a Spy in every linked page, or indeed in any page at all:  if there are pages that don't return any information to the menu, it will just react like any non-Spytracking menu when those pages are opened and do nothing.

The Spytracking system will work only if an applet has been registered.