Iterating through menustrip items

Introduction

It is quite difficult to set the properties of toolstrip menu items like if you want to disable certain items or make them invisible. It is simple to set them individually, but if you want to iterate through all the items it's quite difficult. This article explains how you can iterate through all ToolStripMenuItems of a menu strip.

Background

The given code works on a recursive method call.

Using the Code

// if we have a MenuStrip named ts.

foreach (ToolStripMenuItem mainMenu in ts.Items)
{
    if (mainMenu.Visible)
    {
        // navigate through each submenu
        SetToolStripItems(mainMenu.DropDownItems);
    }
}

private void  SetToolStripItems(ToolStripItemCollection dropDownItems)
{
    try
    {
        foreach (object obj in dropDownItems)
        //for each object because it could be toolstrip separator as well.
        {
            if (obj.GetType().Equals(typeof(ToolStripMenuItem)))
            //if we get the desired object type.
            {
                ToolStripMenuItem subMenu = (ToolStripMenuItem)obj;
                // cast to ToolStripMenuItem

                if (subMenu.HasDropDownItems) // if subMenu has children
                {
                    SetToolStripItems(subMenu.DropDownItems); // Call recursive Method.
                }
                else // Do the desired operations here.
                {
                    if (subMenu.Tag != null)
                    {
                        subMenu.Visible = 
                          AccountsGlobals.FormRights(Convert.ToInt32(subMenu.Tag)).CanAccess;
                        subMenu.Enabled  = 
                          AccountsGlobals.FormRights(Convert.ToInt32(subMenu.Tag)).CanAccess;
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        MessageBox.Show(ex.Message, "SetToolStripItems", 
                        MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error);
    }
}

Points of Interest

Recursive methods are quite useful when you don't know the depth of the loops.