This page is a general overview for Kettic menu UI (User Interface) control library, which is part of the Kettic UI Control SDK for ASP.NET AJAX. In this page, we will bring about an introduction for it, along with its amazing features and functionalities. After reading this page, you will have a general understanding of this menu control.

As long as you have installed Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 or above, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 or above, you can now download the free trial version from this page and get started with menu integration in ASP.NET AJAX.

Using Kettic menu control for ASP.NET AJAX, web developers can easily customize all kinds of menu properties to create a tailored menu according to your requirement. Corresponding aspx and Visual C# / Visual Basic .NET sample codes are all provided for your reference.

You will find it quite easy to add root items and layers of child items to build a perfect hierarchical structure. When all the items are in place, you can also adjust properties for each items. Available properties include Item Text, Item Value, Item Seleted, Item Tooltip, Item Enabled, to name a few here.

Besides customizing menu through utilizing built-in skins, customizing skins, adding an image, modifying css classes, web developers can also feel free to control menu content and appearance by adding different types of templates.

Right now there are two types of menu templates for you to select from: item template and content template. As for item templates, there are global item template which have influence all items within a menu, and individual item template which influence only a single item. You can select one according to your requirement. Using content template, developers can add other third party control into the menu, which greatly improve the diversity.

Web developers can utilize the Toggle Handling feature of Kettic menu control for ASP.NET AJAX, which, when set to true, can add a toggle button beside a parent item. This property can help expand the child items when the parent item is either clicked or touched. When used for mobile devices, this feature can be quite helpful.

If you have a number of items to be displayed at one time, you can enable the multi column feature provided by Kettic menu control library. This will enable you to display the child items horizontally or vertically with multiple columns.

For cosmetic effect, users can also try to add separators in your menu, and add animation effect for your menu control while expanding or collapsing child items. Additionally, you can make some customization for the Click to Open feature, so the item expands when users click on the parent item instead of mouse hovers over it.

Here is a detailed guide for all the supported menu control features.

Apart from the features and functions introduced above, web developers and programmers can also trigger rich options of client side events and server side events to control your menu behaviors to better interact with mouse click, item creation, item population, etc.

Besides creating your menu item structure manually, developers can opt to populate your menu through data binding. In this way you can easily bind your item properties to specified field within your data source. Currently we support different data sources such as XMLDataSource, LinqDataSource, SqlDataSource, DataTable, and so on.