Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition

Chapter 16. Site Navigation

The Web applications that you develop generally have more than a single page to them. Usually you create a number of Web pages that are interconnected in some fashion. If you also build the navigation around your collection of pages, you make it easy for the end user to successfully work through your application in a straightforward manner.

Currently, you must choose among a number of different ways to expose the paths through your application to the end user. The difficult task of site navigation is compounded when you continue to add pages to the overall application.

The present method for building navigation within Web applications is to sprinkle pages with hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are generally added to Web pages by using include files or user controls. They can also be directly hard-coded onto a page so that they appear in the header or the sidebar of the page being viewed. The difficulties in working with navigation become worse when you move pages around or change page names. Sometimes developers are forced to go to each and every page in the application just to change some aspect of the navigation.

ASP.NET 2.0 tackles this problem with the introduction of a navigation system that makes it quite trivial to manage how end users work through the applications you create. This new capability in ASP.NET is complex; but the great thing is that it can be as simple as you need it to be, or you can actually get in deep and control every aspect of how it works. ...