PShearing
Posts: 6
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| Posted: 03/08/2008, 6:41 AM |
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Anybody have experience using vertical tree menus?
I have a number of single-column vertical menus, driven from a database . This has worked fine to date. I decided that one of the menus was too complex and so I re-engineered the menu with a few level-1 headings that cause menu items to appear to the right as "flu-out" sub-menus. Standard stuff.
The first problem is this - I am using Frames (yeah I know - ugh! But I cannot achieve the control I need over layout any other way, honest). The menu is in a frame on the left that has a width that matches the top level menu items and this stops the flyout sub menus from appearing. (They are being generated, just not showing because they are effectively displaying outside the boundaries of the narrow frame.)
So, I have investigated Vertical Tree Menus. These look to be an excellent solution. When you click on a "parent" menu node, the menu is redrawn with the heading in bold face and child items below rather than to the right.
The second problem is this. Only some (in fact very few) of my menu entries are "parents" with sub-menus. Most are simple links. Now I have created my menu as a vertical tree, it appears that the system is treating all top level nodes as though they are parents (but with empty child menus). I click on these nodes and nothing happens (other than the cycling through Bold and Normal typeface). The links are not respected and there is no modification of the menu background when the mouse hovers over the menu items.
Have I misunderstood vertical tree menus (these is very little documentation)? What do you reckon I could I do? Any suggestions welcome.
Kind regards
Paul
CCS4.0.0.3. ASP. MS SQL 2005 Win 2003 IIS6. Firefox and IE6 / 7
Oh yeah, before somebody asks, the database table that drives the menus has a ParentID field (int4) that identifies the parent node for a sub-menu. It contains a NULL for all entries that are not parents.
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PShearing
Posts: 6
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| Posted: 04/01/2008, 2:45 PM |
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Solved my own problem:
If anyone is interested, I have modified the CCS code for Vertical Tree Menus to open a gap (lower items slide down) and insert sub-menu items in the same vertical line as the main menu items when a heading is clicked. Thus the main menu and sub-menu are all aligned such that they occupy the same width and can therefore be accommodated in a narow menu frame at the left of the screen. A subsequent click on the heading closes the gap.
A style sheet ensures that sub-menu items are rendered with a different background so that it is obvious which is which. The whole thing is database driven. I can supply the code if it is of interest to anyone.
Paul
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...Anon |
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