Navigation Bar

• Jun 28, 2021
• 3 minutes to read

The ASPxNavBar allows you to introduce cutting edge site navigation capabilities to your ASP.NET solutions with ease and simplicty. Whether you wish to emulate a Windows® Style Explorer Bar or an MS Outlook® SideBar within your application, the ASPxNavBar is packed with countless developer friendly features specifically designed to help you build your best - without limits or compromise. In addition to traditional UI presentation elements, the ASPxNavBar allows you to create highly customized navigation options with its built-in template support - you can use it anywhere and everywhere you need to display list-oriented information to end-users.

With countless layout and appearance customization options, the ASPxNavBar guarantees your ability to deliver a UI that best suits your business needs and those of your customers. Like all DevExpress ASP.NET controls, it fully supports AJAX technology and provides CSS styles, a client-side API/events and can render itself for all popular browsers.

This topic lists the features that are unique to ASPxNavBar.

Control Features

• You can bind the ASPxNavBar to a given data source to retrieve group and item information from an XML file.
• Templates can be specified for group headers in an expanded and collapsed state, group content area and individual items. This gives you the ability to introduce highly customized UI elements to your web page.
• You can change the appearance of each element in each state either directly via properties or by assigning a CSS class.
• Several themes are available so you can apply a uniform and elegant design to your navigation bar with just a couple of mouse clicks.

AJAX Support

You can enable AJAX support by setting the EnableCallbacks property to true. In this case, ASPxNavBar initially loads only the content of expanded groups onto the client. When end-users expand groups, their content is loaded via callbacks. Once a group’s content has been loaded, end-users can switch to this group on the client-side without callbacks or postbacks.

Client-Side Features

• Client-side events allow you to respond to item and group header clicks and perform custom actions when groups are being expanded and collapsed.
• You can use our client-side API to expand and collapse groups, obtain link/item information, and change the selected item.

Group Features

• An easy-to-use design-time group collection editor is available.
• You can change expand button alignment either for all groups at once or for each group individually.
• Custom images can be used as expand and collapse buttons.
• Group headers can serve as links - simply assign a proper URL to the corresponding property.
• Groups headers can display custom images in addition to text.
• You can prevent your end-users from collapsing individual groups.
• Tooltips can be assigned to group headers.
• You can customize group spacing.
• Groups can be expanded/collapsed either using mouse hover or click.

Item Features

• An easy-to-use design-time item collection editor is available.
• Images can be displayed together with text.
• You can specify where end-users can click to use item functionality. The available variants are item text, both image and text or the complete item area.
• You can specify where item images should be displayed relative to item text for all items in a given group. Images can be located above or below text, to the right or its left.
• The ASPxNavBar allows you to highlight selected items.
• Tooltips can be assigned to individual items.