Asp.net menu – show parent as selected

I’ve been working on a group of tools for my company in asp.net, and have been using an ASP Master page with an ASP menu sourced from a Web.SiteMap xml file. Looks a little like this:

Default menu

I’ve got sub-menu’s under each heading, that look like this:

Showing submenu from parent hover

 

The problem I’ve been struggling with is that upon selecting an item from the sub-menu, the sub-menu is hidden (which is desired) but the parent doesn’t show as selected.

This is because in Net 4.0, you can only have one item in a menu set as selected, which happens to be the actual page that is displayed. Since my sub-menu is hidden except at rollover, I don’t care that the child is shown as selected.

I finally found a solution that worked for me, based on this StackOverflow question.

However, it is a bit of a hack instead of a real solution. Basically, we deselect the child, and select the parent instead. For those who don’t hide the sub-menu, this may not be appropriate (which was the original intent of the StackOverflow question above.

The other downside of this method is that due to the organization of the web.SiteMap xml file, while on the Home page it doesn’t show as selected. This is a small price to pay for the overall benefit of parent selection in my case.

aspx page:


            

 

aspx codebehind

protected void Menu1_MenuItemDataBound(object sender, MenuEventArgs e)
    {
        if (SiteMap.CurrentNode != null)
        {
            if (e.Item.Selected == true)
            {
                e.Item.Selected = true;
                e.Item.Parent.Selectable = true;
                e.Item.Parent.Selected = true;
            }
        }
    }

Web.SiteMap


    
    
    
		
		
		
    
       
		
    
    
		
    
		
    
  

Final Result:

Parent selected instead of child

One thought to “Asp.net menu – show parent as selected”

  1. Good how to. Two issues I had that may help other people:
    1. I would get an error when selecting the parent. Changing the if to if (e.Item.Selected == true && e.Item.Parent != null) resolved the issue for me. Depending on your CSS this fix may not work.
    2. This only worked for me for items one level below the parent. 2 levels below did not set the parent as selected. Do not have a fix for this yet.

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