Month: February 2008

Some time ago I needed to render hierarchical data to a <ul>/<li> elements structure and also be able to render a special attribute to the <li> Html elements.

Using TreeView control I found no better way than re-implement the Render method, loosing the out-of-the-box binding process.

Since I want to have a control similar to TreeView with all its binding richness I decide to write a ListView control.

This is the typical declaration I want to achieve:

<NG:ListView ID="orderedlistView1" runat="server" DataSourceID="SiteMapDataSource1" Mode="Ordered">

  <DataBindings>

    <NG:ListNodeBinding DataMember="SiteMapNode" AttributeField="Url" TextField="Title" />

    <NG:ListNodeBinding DataMember="SiteMapNode" AttributeField="Url" TextField="Url" Depth="1"/>

    <NG:ListNodeBinding DataMember="SiteMapNode" AttributeField="Title" TextField="Title" Depth="2"/>

  </DataBindings>

</NG:ListView>

It looks pretty familiar…

In ListView control you can set the Mode property to choose whether to render an ordered list (<ol>) or an unordered list (<ul>).

Using the ListNodeBinding you can also use the AttributeField property to specify aditional attributes to rendered in the <li> html element (ex: <li Url=”my Url” >some text</li>).

Also, there’s no hierarchy depth limit.