I'm rewriting a classic ASP site in ASP.NET 2.0.  I'm trying to determine if I'll use a sitemap for the menus or not.  I'll use one for other purposes:  I have a "You are on" area where I display the current page name.  I get it from the sitemap.  I also have a javascript function to bookmark the page - this is on the master page, and is one of the bottom menu options.  I need to pass it the title and URL of the page to be bookmarked.  I currently have it in a content control that I override in each of the content pages, but I'd much rather grab the data from the sitemap.  It seems silly to have something on the master page that is overwritten by every content page.  When I try to use the sitemap data, say with <%= SiteMap.CurrentNode.Title %>, I don't get the title in the bookmark, I get "%= SiteMap.CurrentNode.Title %, ".  BTW if anyone has a better way to bookmark the page, please let me know.  Googleing bookmark returns lots of sites with bookmark buttons or links, not sites explaining how to do it.

The default page and the homepage (these are two different pages) have a menu at the bottom, call it menu-1.  The default and home pages are the only two pages that contain menu-1.  I think this menu should be on these two content pages?

I have a menu across the top of every page, and a menu along the bottom.  These are in the Master page.  I also have a few directory pages that contain rows of links to other pages in the site, making each of these effectively menus.  Should I treat the directory pages as menus and use the sitemap to populate these menus?  Can I do all this with one sitemap?  How?

This is my first ASP.NET project, so be gentle, and explain in baby steps please!

 TIA, Diane

You can do this with one or two sitemaps. If using one, then make sure your sitemap has a strict hierarchy, eg:

<siteMapNode>
  <siteMapNode url="Menu1.aspx">
    ... nodes for menu 1 ...
  </siteMapNode>
  <siteMapNode url="Menu2.aspx">
    ... nodes for menu 2 ...
  </siteMapNode>
</siteMapNode>

So you keep all of the nodes for the different menus separate, each under a root node of their own. Then at the top of the master page, for menu 1, you have:

<asp:SiteMapDataSource id="menu1Data" runat="server" StartingNodeUrl="Menu1.aspx" ShowStartingNode="false" />

and for the bottom menu you have:

<asp:SiteMapDataSource id="menu2Data" runat="server" StartingNodeUrl="Menu2.aspx" ShowStartingNode="false" />

Now the two menu controls (each bound to a differnt SiteMapDataSource) will only show the nodes starting from their menu. Make sense?

There is also nothing to stop you using multiple site map files, but I'm not sure that's necessary.

Dave

Thank you Dave.  I solved this, but in a different way.  I have a couple of menus off of the same page, so I added a querystring to make the url different. 

<siteMapNode url="default.aspx" title="Home" description="WriteAPrisoner.com">
    <siteMapNode url="homepage.aspx" title="HomePage" description="Home Page">
        <siteMapNode url="form-share-story.aspx" title="Share Your Success Story!" description="Success Story" />
        <siteMapNode url="subscribe.aspx" title="Join Our Email List!" description="Email List" />     
    </siteMapNode>
    <siteMapNode url="homepage.aspx?m=second" title="HomePage" description="Home Page">
        <siteMapNode url="inmateads.aspx" title="Inmate Ads" description="Inmate Ads">
            <siteMapNode url="allcustomers.aspx" title="Newest Members" description="Newest Members" />
            <siteMapNode url="statelistings.aspx" title="State Listings" description="State Listings" />
        </siteMapNode>
    </siteMapNode>
</siteMapNode>

I never thought of using different SiteMapDataSources.  That makes things much easier.

The other problem I have is a page can be on more than one menu.  Will using multiple SiteMapDataSources solve that?  At the moment, I'm using the site map for a 'You are on '  page name.  My menus are currently the same links I have for the Classic ASP version of the site.  This will at least work until I can get the menus working.

Diane

Yep, query strings work just as well for splitting the menu up. Good idea.

The page being on more than one menu can become a problem if you want to highlight the trail, for example using a SiteMapPath. While you can also specify the provider in the SiteMapPath, you'd have to decide which provider to use, so ensure you get the right hierarchy. If you want to extract the title for a given node, then you can do this in code too, but again you'd have to specify the provider. Normally you'd do something like:

SiteMap.CurrentNode.Title

to get the title, but you'd have to specify the provider:

SiteMap.Providers["MyProvider"].CurrentNode.Title

So it's easy to do, you just have to be careful about where you get your data.

d

Sounds good.  Once I get some other issues worked out, I'll come back to the menus.  Thanks you.

Diane