adding menu using web-service / best practices

[Piyush Bhatt]

I wanted to find out what is the best practice for showing menu in the application if we are using KendoUI. Whether it should be rendered from the server side using <ul> <li> tags or whether we should add dynamically using a web-service.

I prepared a blog post with an example of how I did this but I am not too sure if this would be the recommended way going forward. -  http://piyushbhatt.blogspot.com/2011/12/kendoui-adding-menu-using-web-service.html 

Overall - I think we would need the functions in kendoUI objects' such a way that developer should not have to use selectors (like "li:last" or "li:first") etc and can work with the objects and methods only. 

Again this is not direct question per say - but to know your thoughts on best practices and how you think people will be using various widgets in large applications.

[Kamen Bundev]

Hello Piyush,

You can add one or several items directly (along with sub items, images, sprites, etc) by passing a JSON object as a Menu dataSource, like this:
$("#menu").kendoMenu({
    dataSource: [{
        text: "Item 1",
        url: "http://www.kendoui.com"                // Link URL if navigation is needed, optional.
    },
    {
        text: "Item 2",
        imageUrl: "http://www.kendoui.com/test.jpg", // Item image URL, optional.
        items: [{                                    // Sub item collection
             text: "Sub Item 1"
        },
        {
             text: "Sub Item 2"
        }]
    },
    {
        text: "Item 3",
        spriteCssClass: "imageClass3"                // Item image sprite CSS class, optional.
    }]
});

The same JSON object can be used in append() too. Our documentation will get these updates soon.

All the best,
Kamen Bundev
the Telerik team