can you provide more information?
what is "the folders from dashboard" and what route is "Sidebar" being used?

this is my architecture, but as you can see in the documentation of nextjs, the other pages are inside the dashboard (ref: https://nextjs.org/docs/app/api-reference/functions/use-selected-layout-segment#examples) The code is working when the other pages are inside the dashboard, but i want it to outside the dashboard,

like this:

localhost:3000/dashboard
localhost:3000/dashboard/course

i want to display sidebar in dashboard page, coruse page and forum page.

what i want to achive is to set the bg color of the active link, which is not working from the code above ><

So your sidebar is exported to 3 different routes?

Yesss ::

Why not put it in the root layout

That way you can access selectedLayoutSegments

The problem with selectedLayoutSegments is that it only detect inw level below

If your Sidebar is in /dashboard, it cant tell if you went to /forum or /course

One could argue if you decided to export ur sidebar, why not just hard code it which one is selected, but that wouldnt be efficient because you need to rerender your whole sidebar int he server

If your sidebar is in a common layout then not only you dont rerender the sidebar in the server at soft navigation, but you have access to selectedLayoutSegments()