Missing popout class in ASP.NET menu for nodes without a URL

Question

I’m having a little problem with the popout icon in the ASP menu control not appearing when the sitemap node doesn’t have a URL. Take the following sitemap nodes as an example:

<siteMapNode title="Top 1" url="~/Top1.aspx">
  <siteMapNode title="Sub 1" url="~/Sub1.aspx" />
</siteMapNode>
<siteMapNode title="Top 2">
  <siteMapNode title="Sub 2" url="~/Sub2.aspx" />
</siteMapNode>

The first top level item – Top 1 – gets a popout CSS class written to the tag that spans the label. However the second top level item – Top 2 – does not get the class. Given this class is generally used to hold the arrow indicating there’s more content beneath the item there’s a bit of a usability problem here.

Does anyone have a workaround for this? Or alternatively, is a sitemap node without a URL attribute somehow breaking the intended usage of the control?

Answer 1

Try setting the url property to #:

<siteMapNode title="Top 2" url="#">

Probable cause of error is that without url field, the node is not link, and CSS is set to apply on links.

Answer 2

So it appears this behaviour is only occurring in ASP.NET4 and was all good in previous versions. I'm calling this one as a bug in the newer control rendering mode. More info here: http://www.troyhunt.com/2010/09/net4-web-apps-and-mysteriously-absent.html