site navigation

I have a huge site to redo in asp.net. The site is currently coded in asp. There is a ton of navigation in the site. I want to be able to maintain it very easily without having to edit every page in the site if it changes.

In the asp site, we have used an array to hold the navigation and displayed it using elements in the array and a bunch of if then statements. There are on, off, at, primary, secondary, and tertiary conditions for the nav. Depending on what it is, a certain color bullet shows up next to it and the background color behind the link changes. It is pretty complex.

I have a file holding the array, a file holding the table structure of the nav with the if then statments deploying certain html depending on the array elements and the actual pages.

I don't think that I can do this in .NET very easily. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to manage large amounts of navigation that must have on, off, at, primary, secondary and tertiary navigation structures? All examples I have seen (tree view) do not work for what I need. Is there a better way to handle this?

I have attached an example of the navigation control file with the if then statments. I don't know if it helps or not.

Thank you for any suggestions.

dude:

I was faced with a very similar problem. In the end I converted the whole navigation scheme into an xml file. With xml you can have all sorts of different entries and attributes so you can define everything you need.

In the end mine worked like this:

The navigation had to accomodate 4 different user "roles" if you will.

I had <Button /> Nodes that defined all of the buttons the navigation would have along with what groups they belonged in. Then I had a <UserRole> node that I had all the different user roles and what buttons each one had access to. This made the navigation very scalable and maintainable since the whole navigation could be handled from one xml file.

Take a look at all the xml features of dotnet. what your're looking for is in there.