Building a Data-Driven Navigation Menu

Navigation menus are the forefront of just about any website, whether the site is a dynamic database driven application or simply a personal homepage. They lead and direct your user around the pages of your site and provide the basis for your usability experience. A site that is difficult to navigate is a site that will not be popular with your users.

When working with ASP.NET you have a lot of extra flexibility when working with a navigation menu. In most development languages, your menu needs to be copied/pasted onto all of your pages, or at the very least you had to use include statements to place the menu at the top of every page. This process is very redundant and cumbersome.

ASP.NET offers the ability to create user controls, which are custom chunks of HTML and code-behind server logic which can be dragged/dropped onto any .aspx Web form in your application, making the development of a component such as a navigation menu quite easy, and very reusable.

In addition to a custom user control, you can add in your own server logic to extend the menu control even further and allow it to be data-driven from a database of your choice. This way your menu is rendered on-the-fly dynamically from records read from a database table which can be modified in real time.

In this tutorial we will build a sample application to demonstrate this powerful technique. We will build a custom user control to house our navigation menu which can be dropped onto any page in our application. And we will implement functionality to make our user control database driven from an Access .mdb database, rendering menu items and submenu items dynamically.