The items of RadMenu have a few important properties, which are listed below:

• Text is the text of the item as it appears in the menu.
• Value lets you associate a text value with the menu item that you can use when programming the menu behavior. If the item is selected, the SelectedValue property of RadMenu will return the value of this property (if it is empty then the value of the Text property will be returned).
• Selected specifies whether the item should be selected. If set to True - the SelectedItem property of RadMenu will return this item.
• ToolTip is the text of a tooltip that appears when the user hovers the mouse over the item.

  Note
  Setting the tooltip can enable an accessibility feature: Special accessibility readers like JAWS can pronounce the tooltip of the highlighted item.

• Enabled controls whether the item is initially enabled or disabled.
• GroupSettings lets you specify how the child items are laid out.
• IsSeparator specifies whether the menu item acts as a separator.
• NavigateUrl and Target cause the menu item to automatically launch another Web page (specified by NavigateUrl) in the window specified by Target. If the Target property is not set, the new Web page uses the current browser window.
• PostBack specifies whether the item causes a postback.
• CssClass, ClickedCssClass, DisabledCssClass, ExpandedCssClas, SelectedCssClass and FocusedCssClass control the appearance of the menu item when it is in its normal state, clicked, disabled, expanded, selected and holds input focus, respectively.
• ImageUrl, ImageClickedUrl, DisabledImageUrl, ExpandedImageUrl, SelectedImageUrl and ImageOverUrl let you specify an image that appears on the left of the menu item when it is in its normal state, clicked, disabled, expanded, selected and when the mouse hovers over it, respectively.

In addition to the built-in properties, you can add your own custom attributes to menu items to expand their functionality.

There are numerous ways to populate a menu with items. These include

• Declaring items statically at design time
• Adding items in server-side code
• Adding items in client-side code
• Loading Items from an XML file or string
• Populating the menu from a WebService
• Binding to a data source

Other Resources