ColdFusion 8: AJAX UI Menus
Continuing on with my tour of the new AJAX UI controls in ColdFusion 8, today I want to talk about menus. It seems like I've been building DHTML menus since before the dinosaurs walked the Earth, so it's nice to see this made a heck of a lot easier in ColdFusion 8. Let's get into it.
At the simplest level, menus are made with the cfmenu and cfmenuitem tags:
<cfmenu bgColor="##c0c0c0">
This example creates a menu with two items. One that will show "Item One", and link to Adobe, and another one labeled "Item Two" that will link to CNN. I supplied an optional background color. By default the menu will be a normal horizontal menu. This creates the menu you see here. (I put some text under the menu so you could see it in context.)
<cfmenuitem display="Item One" href="http://www.adobe.com" />
<cfmenuitem display="Item Two" href="http://www.cnn.com" />
</cfmenu>
How do you create sub menus? Just nest the menu items!
<cfmenu bgColor="##c0c0c0">
<cfmenuitem display="Adobe" href="http://www.adobe.com" />
<cfmenuitem display="Products">
<cfmenuitem display="ColdFusion" href="http://www.adobe.com/go/coldfusion" />
<cfmenuitem display="Flash" href="http://www.adobe.com/go/flash" />
</cfmenuitem>
</cfmenu>
This example creates a submenu under a menu named Products. You can see this in action here.
How about a vertical menu? Just add a type to the cfmenu tag:
<cfmenu bgColor="##c0c0c0" selectedItemColor="##ff0000" type="vertical" width="200">
I added a few things here. First the type="vertical". Then notice I also specified a highlight color for the menu. I think the red goes great with the gray. Next - since this isn't a menu going across the page, I supplied a width. I put this into a table and you can see the result here.
Another option - you can supply images to go along with your menu items. These should (obviously) be smaller sized images. I'm using a Silk Icon in the next example:
<cfmenuitem display="ColdFusion" href="http://www.adobe.com/go/coldfusion" image="page_white_coldfusion.png" />
Another modification you can make is to add dividers. This would be useful for breaking up a long menu into sections:
<cfmenuitem divider="true" />
Demo here.
So thats a quick look at cfmenu. I didn't cover everything (that's what docs are for!), but hopefully this will give you a taste of the control.
Comments
@Thomas - Ditto - file an ER. Adobe _does_ listen to bug reports.
<div id="_cf_menu1182244792322"
because all ids have to start with a letter.
--Dave
Also, on IE (so far I found IE7), you can't finish a cfmenuitem block with a "cfmenuitem divider=true", it will throw a JavaScript error. You must finish with a "content" cfmenuitem. On Firefox, Safari and Opera runs fine.
The images are set as css background images. On a horizontal menu with more than a few items and images, the text may overlap the image some. You can over-ride the width by adding css for the name of the item, such as cfmenuitem name="foo" would be #foo {width:120px;}
I couldn't get the text to right or center align with the cfmenu style. Had to add in css for the element such as #foo {text-align:right}
On large menus, the menu shows up in vertical order then 'flashes' to horizontal. Think maybe this is lazyload but not sure.
Of you have a large amount of sub-menu items, the scrolling is slow.
And lastly, I see that showdelay is set to 200ms. Do you know how I can change that after the page is loaded?