SiteMapLite, Adding Html helpers

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. 

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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][1].

Till next time

[ [@minhajuddin][2] ] [1]: http://github.com/minhajuddin/sitemaplite [2]: http://twitter.com/minhajuddin

I am currently working on LiveForm which makes setting up contact forms on your website a breeze.