This demo illustrates how you can bind the ASPxMenu control to a data source.
The ASPxMenu control supports the standard way of data binding. In this instance any object which implements the
IHierarchicalEnumerable or IHierarchicalDataSource interface (e.g. SiteMapDataSource, XmlDataSource)
may be used as a data source for this control.
In this demo, the menu control is bound to a ASPxSiteMapDataSource type data source.
The ASPxSiteMapDataSource allows you to load site map data at runtime from a specific file by using the LoadFromFile method.
This method is passed with a parameter which specifies the path to the .sitemap file which contains the required data.
Note that at design-time, the ASPxSiteMapDataSource component contains a predefined site map tree structure.
Although the site map data source is not connected to any site map provider (its SiteMapProvider property is not set explicitly),
a call to the LoadFromFile method when the page loads, automatically creates an internal instance of our specific
UnboundSiteMapProvider provider which supplies the site map data source component with new data from the specified file.
Refer to VB or C# code to see how the LoadFromFile method is called on the page's load.
Note that the menu's ItemDataBound event can be used to manipulate the values being assigned to the properties of
a menu item during its data binding. Look at the ItemDataBound event's implemetation (see VB or C# code) that demonstrates
how to assign a specific value to a menu item's Text property by combining the text to be assigned to this property with the
value of the specific result attribute of the corresponding site map node which the item is being bound to.