Hi,

Please see whether what you had in mind is similar to this sample:

http://www.essentialobjects.com/Demo/Default.aspx?path=Menu\_i0\_i5

The key for this sample is that each MenuGroup (sub menu) can be set to vertical or horizontal. The default is vertical for the second level and on, but second level sub menus are set as horizontal in this sample.

In order to control whether a sub menu is initially visible, you can set its parent item's Expanded to true:

http://www.essentialobjects.com/ViewDoc.aspx?t=EO.Web.NavigationItem.Expanded.html

Note you can only have one item set to expanded at any time. In the previous example, you can set top level "Consumer"'s Expanded to true. That way "Consumer"'s sub menu will initially render as expanded.

By default, a sub menu closes when you click one of its menu item. The following two properties can be used to override this behavior:

http://www.essentialobjects.com/ViewDoc.aspx?t=EO.Web.MenuGroup.KeepExpandedOnClick.html
http://www.essentialobjects.com/ViewDoc.aspx?t=EO.Web.Menu.CollapseDelay.html

The menu does not provide any breadcrumb features. It does provide a Selected property with which you can use to highlight one or more items. Note that Selected only means a separate style. So you can have multiple item's Selected set to true. The menu also can automatically select an item whose NavigateUrl matches your current page Url. To do that set AutoSelectSource to NavigateUrl and AutoSelectTarget to Item or Path:

http://www.essentialobjects.com/ViewDoc.aspx?t=EO.Web.BaseNavigator.AutoSelectSource.html
http://www.essentialobjects.com/ViewDoc.aspx?t=EO.Web.BaseNavigator.AutoSelectTarget.html

Our menu is based on JavaScript and DHTML. So it has nothing to do with Flash.

Hope this helps. Please feel free to let us know if you still have any questions.

Thanks!

Hi,

To your questions:

#1: Yes. Conceptually very similar. You will want to go over these two topics:
http://www.essentialobjects.com/ViewDoc.aspx?t=MenuCommon%2fStyleAndAppearance%2fitem_state.html
http://www.essentialobjects.com/ViewDoc.aspx?t=MenuCommon%2fStyleAndAppearance%2fmenu_item_styles.html

Basically each menu item can be in one of the pre-defined state: normal, hover, etc. For each state you can specify a different style. For example, you can set the normal state to have blue color, hover state to have red color.

2. You do not need any programming skill to just modify the menu. We provide UI for you to do so:

http://www.essentialobjects.com/ViewDoc.aspx?t=menucommon%2fmenubuilder.html

The above document is for standard alone mode because standard alone covers every step. In reality you will almost always use it together with Visual Studio. When using Visual Studio you should follow this topic:

http://www.essentialobjects.com/ViewDoc.aspx?t=Menu%2fQuickStartGuide%2fguide_regular.html

In addition to the provided UI, the menu does allow you to modify everything programmatically. Mostly used programming features include dynamically generating menu items from your database. In that case obviously you will need to know how to program. The code would not be much about the menu at all. It's much more about organizing and programming your data. Once you have the data prepared, you give it to the menu and the menu generates the menu items based on your data. The process is as simple/complicate as your business logic. Our end is very simple.

If you want to get a more concrete feeling, a good starting point for you would be the sample project. It includes many samples using different ways to populate the menu from a data source, or change something about the menu programmatically. You can take a look of those. First find out if a sample fits your scenario. Then check the source code of that sample (you will need to download and install it to have the full source code) and see if that looks easy to you.

3. The previous sample uses Menu only. So that's the only product you will need to purchase;

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Yes. You can use the UI to complete all menu customizations. In fact even if you use our product inside Visual Studio, Visual Studio still invokes our UI for you to customize our menu. So in short, you do not need Visual Studio to use our product.

Here is a quick start guide for you to create a menu without Visual Studio:

1. Create a web application and a blank .ASPX page (not .HTML) with a few standard controls (for example, a Button, a Label, etc). Get that working first. If you have any question on that part, you would need to seek other resource. Our support will not cover that;
2. Start Windows Explorer, go to c:\Program Files\EO.Web Controls 2008\(this is the default installation folder, if you installed it somewhere else, you would need to browse whatever folder you installed to), find Net11\EO.Web.Design.exe. Run it;
3. Follow the onscreen instruction to customize the menu, then go to "Deploy" tab. Copy the contents in the "Use It" box into your page between the open tag and close tag of the form element. That would place the menu inside your page;
4. Place Net11\EO.Web.dll into your application's bin directory. If you do not have a bin directory, create one;
5. You can now run the page and you should be able to see the menu;

As a reference, you can always check the source code of our sample project (in the same directory you find EO.Web.Design.exe) and compare it with yours. You may also find the help file to be useful. Feel free to let us know if you have problem following steps outlined above.

Hope this helps.

Thanks