SiteMapLite, Adding Html helpers

20 Sep 2009

This might actually be my first open source project coming to fruition. I have created a lot of special Abandon-ware (Special in that they were abandoned before completion).

Anyway, things are looking good with SiteMapLite. In today's iteration I have added a nice MenuHelper to help us render the main navigation bar. It also has a nice Cached SiteMap service which wraps around the actual SiteMap service and caches it nicely, so that the text files are not read and parsed for each request.

    public static class MenuHelper {


        public static string RenderMainNav(this HtmlHelper helper) {
            return RenderMainNav(helper, null);
        }

        public static string RenderMainNav(this HtmlHelper helper, object htmlAttributes) {

            var nodes = CachedSiteMapService.Service.GetNodesForRole("Administrator");
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

            sb.Append("<ul ");

            AppendHtmlAttributes(sb, htmlAttributes);

            sb.Append(">");

            foreach (var node in nodes) {
                sb.AppendFormat("<li><a href='/{0}/{1}' title={2}>{2}</a></li>\r\n", node.Controller, node.Action, node.Title);
            }
            sb.Append("</ul>");
            return sb.ToString();
        }

        private static void AppendHtmlAttributes(StringBuilder sb, object htmlAttributes) {
            PropertyDescriptorCollection properties = TypeDescriptor.GetProperties(htmlAttributes);
            foreach (PropertyDescriptor property in properties) {
                sb.AppendFormat(" {0}='{1}' ", property.Name.Trim('@')/* Remove the @ if the attribute is @class */, property.GetValue(htmlAttributes));
            }
        }
    }

If you see, this MenuHelper just uses the CachedSiteMapService.Service instance to get the nodes for the role Administrator. As of now, we have hard coded the role to Administrator. In a future iteration, We'll write code so that it uses the role of current session. This code creates a simple list of urls and it appends any html attributes passed in input parameter to the ul html attribute. Checkout the updated SiteMapLite code at GitHub.

Till next time

[ @minhajuddin ]