Navigation controls in ASP.Net


Hello and welcome to my blog.  Here I m going to present a very good feature of ASP.net 2.0. While navigating our web pages we are not sure where we are or which menu we just clicked a moment back. We need to think about that and the Asp.net 2.0 brought a very good solution for that i.e. Site Navigation control. Here I will show you how to use site map in our web pages. Just follow the simple steps and you are done...

ü       Open your visual studio .Net and create website.
ü       Click to add new item in your website as ‘web.sitemap’, please do not rename the file name.
ü       Write the below code in your ‘web.sitemap’

xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<siteMap xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/AspNet/SiteMap-File-1.0" >
    <siteMapNode url="Default.aspx" title="Home"  description="Home">
        <siteMapNode url="Page1.aspx" title="Serach"  description="Search" />
        <siteMapNode url="Page2.aspx" title="Grid View Example"  description="Grid View Example" />
    siteMapNode>
siteMap>

ü       To display the sitemap we need to use either Tree view control or Menu control in ASP.Net 2.0.
ü       Here I m going to use ‘TreeView’ control in our page. Write the below code in your page.

<asp:SiteMapDataSource ID="myDataSource" runat="server"  StartingNodeUrl="~/Default.aspx" />
     <asp:TreeView  DataSourceID="myDataSource" ID="TreeView1" runat="server">
    asp:TreeView>
    <asp:SiteMapPath id="SiteMap" BackColor="Green" CurrentNodeStyle-Font-Bold="true" ForeColor="Red" runat="server">
        asp:SiteMapPath>

ü       Now our half of the part is done. We are going to use SiteMap control which will help us to indicate which page we are and directly to go on home page by using  StartNodeURL.
ü       Sitemap data source control will automatically detect the sitemap file in the website and it will the navigation configuration file without any configuration settings. We can set the start page of the sitemap here by setting the page for StartNodeUrl

<asp:SiteMapPath id="SiteMap" BackColor="Green" CurrentNodeStyle-Font-Bold="true" ForeColor="Red" runat="server">
        asp:SiteMapPath>


Sitemap data source control will automatically detect the Sitemap file in the project and it will read the file without any configuration settings. We can set the start page of the SiteMap here by setting the page for “StartNodeUrl”.

Please share your opinions and comments with particular topic. I will try to improve as per your suggestion...

Thank you very much...

Comments