DotNetNuke Daily Tip #10 7/19/06 Other Menu Options?
DotNetNuke Daily Tip for 7/20/2006
DotNetNuke comes with a lot of functionality out of the box that people don't even know exists. Once of those items that has been overlooked by many with the latest releases of DotNetNuke is the DNNMenu, part of the ClientAPI Framework that Jon Henning has worked on.
The SolPartMenu is by far the most used menu for DotNetNuke, it's been part of DNN since the early days, and really can be quite powerful in its implementation. It's also been a big beef with a lot of skin designers as getting solpartmenu working just right can be a bit tricky, and torturous at times. I'm actually a fan of the SolPartMenu, but for today's tip I want to point you to a few resources on the DNNMenu.
I recently, as in last night, implemented the DNNMenu for my wedding site I've been putting together the past few days, you can see it implemented at www.horsesandcars.com.
The DNNMenu was created by Jon Henning, the same developer of the Original SolPartMenu. Here's a quote from Jon
“A few people asked me, the author of the Solution Partners Hierarchical Menu Control, why I would develop a competing menu control to my own. The answer is simple. The SolpartMenu is old and carries a lot of baggage with its almost 4 years worth of backwards compatibility. It has been a goal for v2 of the solpartmenu to abstract all of the common logic not specific to the menu into separate js files that could be reused by other controls and applications. This is exactly what the ClientAPI is; an abstraction of logic like positioning, DOM access, XML, etc. The script for the menu should contain only code for the menu, thus making it easier to maintain and enhance. So in essence, the DNNMenu is in a lot of ways the solpartmenu v2.0.”
And some of the features for DNNMenuKeyboard Navigation
The menu can now receives focus as the user tabs
through the controls on the page. Once it has focus, you
can use the arrow keys to navigate its structure. Pressing
enter will invoke the menu item's clickaction.
Populate On Demand
The DNNMenu will support POD in the same manner as
the DNNTree control. This provide a nice performance boost
for those of you concerned with page sizes. I even had time
to make the module actions menu support POD. See chart below for comparisons between each option and
other menus.
Mouse In Delay
One of the features of the Solpart menu that was
continually asked for was a mouse-in delay. This delay
allows for people who are navigating to the sub-menus and
accidentally move off the parent some grace period to get it
right. The DNNMenu defaults this value to a quarter of a
second (.25). I believe this is acceptable, however, for
users used to the fast response times of other menus, it may
look like the DNNMenu is a little sluggish. Note: At this time there is no way of configuring this property
in the skin.
No Hardcoded Markup
Probably the biggest regret I had in the original
design of the Solpart menu was the hardcoding of certain
tags in the code. This included the NOWRAP attribute added
to the menu items, the use of spacer.gif and to obtain the
correct spacing, and the worst of all, the hardcoding of the
border around the menu items when hovering. None of this
hardcoding is present in the DNNMenu. Note: the one
exception is the spacer.gif that is used to do the iframe
trick. I need a url to point the IFrame to in order to not
get the security error when the site uses SSL.
Option to Remove All Use of Tables
The menu supports a property that will completely
remove its use of tables. Hopefully this will appease
those developers and skinners who think that tableless
designs are the way to go. I originally had
the UseTables property default to False, but since it was
too difficult to keep things lined up across browsers
without adding some "hard-coding" to the css, I
decided that I would default it to True and offer the most
flexibility.
Stay tuned for another DotNetNuke Daily Tip coming tomorrow!