Introduction
WebNavPane is the server control object serving as the root container for WebNavBar objects as well as other available configurations. WebNavPane consists of five main user interface elements listed in the following:
- Header
- Content
- BarResizer
- Bars
- Footer
A bar is represented by WebNavBar object which is contained in Bars collection of WebNavPane. WebNavBar can be constructed in either design-time or runtime.
A bar may consists of one or more items called WebNavBarItem which mainly used as navigation links. The WebNavBarItem can be easily manipulated and accessed through Items collection provided by each WebNavBar object.
The WebNavBar's Items will be used and rendered when the WebNavBar's ContentMode is set to UseItems by default. For extensibility or customized content, you may set the ContentMode to UseInlineContent and put any kind of ASP.NET's server controls. You can also use IFrame ContentMode for better reusability. The ContentMode property can be found in BarSettings object which contains global configurations for Bar.
The WebNavBarItem object provides following features for effective navigation purpose:
- TargetURL
- TargetWindow
More Details
The following shows the hierarchy of a common WebNavPane configuration:
- WebNavPane - NavPane1 (Root Control)
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- Bars (Collection)
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- WebNavBar - barCustomers
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- Items (Collection)
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- WebNavBarItem - itmDefaultView
- WebNavBarItem - itmDetailedView
- WebNavBarItem - itmTopCustomers
- WebNavBar - Employees
For better understanding of WebNavPane hierarchy in visual details, please examine the illustration provided in the following:
The header section shows the currently selected bar's caption, it is set automatically when a Bar becomes selected.
In this release, WebNavPane contains a special Footer element which is used as placeholder for collapsed Bars. A bar become collapsed when user modify the visible Bars by dragging the Resizer Grip to bottom direction. In component level, you can determine how many bars should be visible in the NavPane by specifying the BarVisible property. By default, all bars are set to be visible (BarVisible = -1).
WebNavPane also allows you to customize many user interface elements behaviors, such as CaptionDisplayMode, ImageSize, Size for the Bar, ImagePosition and Alignment for the BarItem and more. The configurations for Bar can be set in global level at BarSettings or at individual WebNavBar object level. Likewise, configurations for BarItem can be set in global level at BarItemSettings or at invidiual WebNavBarItem object level.
Styles
In addition to the sophisticated object model design and rich behaviors, WebNavPane also provides comprehensive customization in visual styles which allow you to achieve professional desktop-like styles in minutes. As the standard of all Intersoft's products, the styles can be easily programmed and configured through strongly-typed object oriented Style.
The following image shows the illustration of all configurable Style in WebNavPane.
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The above is the default style of WebNavPane which is applied automatically when you drop an instance of WebNavPane to designer's surface. For most cases, there are no significant changes required to the default styles and hence lets you quickly proceed to your further application development tasks. |
See Also
Related Topics
{Overview}
{Features}