Chapter 7

jpontes · January 31st, 2011, 01:19 AM

It struck me that the Page_Load code on page 259 to hide/show the treeview/menu depending on which theme you were using was not an ideal way to apply themes as you would have to make a code change with each new theme.

If you create a skin for the treeview and one for the menu in each of the themes, you can set the "visible" to true/false there instead to get the same result while keeping theme code in the themes themselves. In Monochrome, for example:

Code:

<asp:Menu runat="server" SkinID="navMenu" Visible="true"></asp:Menu>
<asp:TreeView runat="server" SkinID="navTree" Visible="false"></asp:TreeView>

(you would want to add the SkinID to the respective controls as well for this to work)

Would this not be the preferred way to do this?

Imar · January 31st, 2011, 03:29 AM

Hi there,

You are absolutely right. This is a very clean way to do it, without the need to maintain code when you change or add themes.

In the book I wanted to show how to programmatically change page layout / behavior based on the theme. That's why I chose this route. However, if all you need to do is hide or show the relevant [FONT='Calibri','sans-serif']navigation [/FONT]controls, your solution is preferred.

The only "downside" I see with this is that themes now need to know about each other. In other words, Monochrome needs to know it needs to hide a navTree TreeView. Not a real big problem though, as themes often end up being tied to a specific application anyway.

Cheers,

Imar