ASP.NET 2.0 Tree Control and Navigation Controls - General Question

[davidwank]

Hi.

Why is it practical to have the ASP.NET navigation controls based on
XML? I would love to just use databinding and then be able to
dynamically update the navgiation menu (e.g. for a product list).

I tried to use a dropdownlist with hyperlinks for navigation (not the
main navigation -- a navigation subset) and even a listbox, but found
it very cumbersome.

The way I figure it now, is that I have to pull the data over from Sql
Server, convert it to XML, reformat into the appropriate nodes, and the
then populate the navigaiton control..

Is there an easier way to do this? What am I missing??

Thanks in advance!
-Ranginald

[Alex Krawarik[MSFT]]

Are you talking specifically about the SiteNav/SiteMap stuff? The short
answer is that the Site Nav data store reflects well with an XML-style tree
view of your average Web site and for many applications doesnt change often,
so again lends itself well to XML. Couple that with the fact that for large
dynamic sites you can write an XSLT that auto-generates your site nav source
everytime you publish, its a good store.

There is no reason you cannot write your own SiteMap provider and hook it
up to a datastore other than an XML file. I am pretty sure there are even
samples for how to do just this and also extend the Site nav controls in
ASP.NET 2.0 (or were at one time...I wrote them!).
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Hi.

Why is it practical to have the ASP.NET navigation controls based on
XML? I would love to just use databinding and then be able to
dynamically update the navgiation menu (e.g. for a product list).

I tried to use a dropdownlist with hyperlinks for navigation (not the
main navigation -- a navigation subset) and even a listbox, but found
it very cumbersome.

The way I figure it now, is that I have to pull the data over from Sql
Server, convert it to XML, reformat into the appropriate nodes, and the
then populate the navigaiton control..

Is there an easier way to do this? What am I missing??

Thanks in advance!
-Ranginald

[Ranginald]

Yes, I was talking about the site map.
I figured it would be just easier to have a navigation asp.net
control.

I found 2 ways to solve the problem:
1. I used a dropdown list with databinding and wrote some code to pass
the parameters to open the URL

2. I used the dataset.writexml() and added ID and URL attributes using
a sql query and treenode binding.

I guess I was hoping that I could just bind a dataset to the
TreeBindingControl so everything could be dynamic, but the above
methods solved the problem...

Thanks!