One-Level ASP.NET Menu – FlatMenu

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Introduction

The simple menu can be applied foremost to navigate among several web forms. Features of the FlatMenu:

1. One-Level menu only (no popup submenus).
2. Rendering brief HTML code into div and span (no table tr td).
3. Possibility to invocate of PostBack for each single menu item.
4. No extra worthless JavaScript (except of PostBack sure).
5. Distinguished menu item of the just loaded web form.
6. Simple, well-arranged XML file data source in one place.
7. Horizontal and vertical layout option.

Background

Using the code

Data binding

In the Page_Load method of the Web Form

flatMenu.DataSource = Server.MapPath("FlatMenu.xml");
flatMenu.DataBind();

or caching menu to avoid access to file system by every request: in Application_Start (Global.asax.cs)

XmlDocument xmlMenu = new XmlDocument();
xmlMenu.Load(Server.MapPath("FlatMenu.xml"));
Application["flatMenu"] = xmlMenu;

and again the method Page_Load

flatMenu.DataSource = Application["flatMenu"];
flatMenu.DataBind();

XML data source

Example of the structure of the XML file:

<menu>
    <item postback="true">
        <text>
            web form
        </text>
        <url>
            WebForm.aspx
        </url>
    </item>
    <item suppresspostback="true">
        <text>
            other web form
        </text>
        <url>
            OtherWebForm.aspx
        </url>
    </item>
    <item>
        <text>
            CodeProject site
        </text>
        <url>
            http://www.codeproject.com
        </url>
    </item>
</menu>

Attribute postback means click on this menu item raises the postback. When active (current loaded) menu item has attribute supresspostback="true" then every other menu items behave as common a tag, so no postback raises.

Active menu item

The HTML tag belong to menu item of just loaded web form has this class attribute:

span class="activeHoriz", for horizontal menu layout
div class="activeVert", for vertical menu layout

CSS design

For customize design by CSS is important how the menu is rendered into the HTML code.

Horizontal rendering:

<div id="idFlatMenu">
    <span><a></a></span>
    <span class="activeHoriz"></span>
    <span><a></a></span>
</div>

Vertical rendering:

<div id="idFlatMenu">
    <div><a></a></span>
    <div class="activeVert"></span>
    <div><a></a></span>
</div>

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)