Chapter 7. Navigation
When your site contains more than a handful of pages, it's important to have a solid and clear navigation structure that allows users to find their way around your site. By implementing a good navigation system, all the loosely coupled web pages in your project will form a complete and coherent web site.
When you think about important parts of a navigation system, the first thing that you may come up with is a menu. Menus come in all sorts and sizes, ranging from simple and static HTML links to complex, fold-out menus driven by CSS or JavaScript. But there's more to navigation than menus alone. ASP.NET comes with a number of useful navigation controls that allow you to set up a navigation system in no time. These controls include the Menu, TreeView, and SiteMapPath, which you'll learn about in this chapter.
Besides visual controls like Menu, navigation is also about structure. A well-organized site is easy for your users to navigate. The site map that is used by the navigation controls helps you define the logical structure of your site.
Another important part of navigation takes place at the server side. Sending a user from one page to another in Code Behind based on some condition is a very common scenario. For example, imagine an administrator entering a new CD or concert review in the Management section of the web site. When the review is done, you may want to show the administrator the full details of it on a new page.
In this chapter, you'll learn how ...
