Being a quite commonly used user interface control for the Kettic ASP.NET AJAX UI SDK, toolbar component library provides flexible options for developers to design and configure. In this guiding page, we will focus on how to customize the toolbar in your ASP.NET web application using the toolbar item templates which are to be introduced in the following sections.

You might already know that in order to control the look and feel of your toolbar, you can directly apply the built-in skin, customize the skins on your own, add a user-specified image / picture for your toolbar button, or you can control it by modifying corresponding css files. However, now you are about to learn another method to achieve that purpose, that is, by customizing the toolbar templates.

To set the appearance of your toolbar control, currently we provide two ways for web developers. The first method is by customizing the ToolBarItem template, which, in general, will have an effect on all the items included in your toolbar menu. What if you want to control the appearance of a specific item? In this case, you can use the second method, and that is to apply the Item template, which will have influence on a single button only.

In general, a toolbar should be used when web developers want to insert other control into a toolbar button. Currently you can embed three types of contents into a toolbar item template: HTML markup, ASP.NET server controls, as well as other controls, such as Kettic ComboBox, ListView, and so on.

In addition, though we have introduced three types of buttons in the toolbar composing element pages, toolbar buttons, and split buttons, drop down buttons, you should note that only former two types supports templates.

In the toolbar template demo page, you will find the complete aspx sample codes for applying templates for the Kettic toolbar items. You can integrate a toolbar control to your AJAX web application to get it all started. Then the sample will take you to apply the item templates and, at the same time, set some basic item elements if necessary, such as text, value, visibility, tooltip, group, etc.

Apart from that, web developers might also find it quite important to bind the toolbar templates when you want to display corresponding data for certain elements / properties like Text. In this case, you can try to apply a toolbar item template and then bind it to your target data. We provide complete tutorial for toolbar data binding to Array, DataTable, SqlDataSource, XmlDataSource, LinqDataSource, etc.