Hi,

You can dynamically build your menu whatever you want:

http://demo.essentialobjects.com/Demos/Menu/Programming/Server%20Side%20Programming/Dynamically%20Modifying%20Menu/Demo.aspx

Loading it from a table is just one of the "shortcut" to load many items at once.

I do not know what you meant by "only the active parts of the menu would get loaded" though. In ASP.NET, the whole page is reloaded every time your page is requested/posted back, so there is no such thing as "only the active parts of the menu would get loaded". It's always a full reload on the server side. The difference is how this reload occurs: whether it's a full reload from your database; or a reload from view state based on post back data, or a combination of both, etc.

Thanks!

Hi,

You can do that with AJAX but I am not sure if it's worth it. Here I will give you the details as to how to load 50 children items for a single root item. It will be something like this:

1. Initially you would have a "root" menu with only one root item (you can have as many root item as you want, just repeat the logic described below). This root item has a single child item. This child item is a dummy "place holder" child item;

2. The dummy "place holder" child item is associated to a "CustomItem" control. CustomItem is a featured provided by our menu that allows you to put anything inside a menu item. You can think "CustomItem" as a standard ASP.NET Panel control that can holds anything else;

3. The CustomItem contains a CallbackPanel. The CallbackPanel then contains a "child menu". This menu has 50 items. This child menu's Visible is initially set to false;

4. When user clicks the root menu item, you make an AJAX call through the CallbackPanel and updates the child menu's visible to true;

Note this method has the following implications:
1. There is a time delay between the time user clicks the menu item and the time all child items are loaded. This usually will confuse users as they expect a menu to instantly opens it sub menu;
2. This will reduce the initial page load time but will not save you on band width as it introduces a second post back;

Overall I would suggest you against this solution because a menu supposes to be instant. If you have to dynamically load child items, consider using a TreeView together with the populate on demand feature.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Okay, I'm trying to work through this a bit and I have another question.

If I programatically add a MenuItem and set RaisesServerEvent = true, how do I create a handler for it server-side?

Thanks.