How to style an asp.net menu with CSS

Question

I'm in the process of styling an asp.net menu and I'm trying to understand the meaning of the StaticSelectedStyle-CssClass and StaticHoverStyle-CssClass parameters.

My understanding is that the styles defined with these parameters are applied as CSS classes to the relevant elements, whenever needed. So I created my menu as follows:

<asp:Menu ID="NavigationMenu" DataSourceID="NavigationSiteMapDataSource" 
        StaticMenuStyle-CssClass="StaticMenuStyle"
        StaticMenuItemStyle-CssClass="StaticMenuItemStyle"
        StaticSelectedStyle-CssClass="StaticSelectedStyle"
        StaticHoverStyle-CssClass="StaticHoverStyle"
        Orientation="Horizontal" 
        MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels="0" 
        runat="server">
</asp:Menu>

It works for StaticMenuStyle-CssClass and StaticMenuStyle-CssClass (the classes are applied to the relevant elements), but StaticSelectedStyle-CssClass and StaticHoverStyle-CssClass are not applied, regardless of the selected or hover status of an element.

What am I supposed to do to make this work?

Thanks.

EDIT: Sorry I should have mentioned that this is .NET 4. Here is the generated HTML:

<div id="NavigationMenu">
 <ul class="level1 StaticMenuStyle">
  <li><a class="level1 StaticMenuItemStyle selected" href="/Link.aspx">Link</a></li>
 </ul>
</div>

So as you can see, StaticMenuStyle and StaticMenuItemStyle are applied, but not StaticSelectedStyle-CssClass or StaticHoverStyle-CssClass. Not sure why. I know I can use selected but isn't the expected behavior that StaticSelectedStyle-CssClass be applied??? By using selected I make assumptions as to what .NET does behind the scenes and that's not right.

Answer 1

I feel your pain and I wasted all night/morning trying to figure this out. With sheer brute force I figured out a solution. Call it a workaround - but it's simple.

Add the CssClass property to your Menu Control's declaration like so:

<asp:Menu ID="NavigationMenu" DataSourceID="NavigationSiteMapDataSource"
        CssClass="SomeMenuClass"
        StaticMenuStyle-CssClass="StaticMenuStyle"
        StaticMenuItemStyle-CssClass="StaticMenuItemStyle"
        Orientation="Horizontal" 
        MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels="0" 
        runat="server">
</asp:Menu>

Just rip out the StaticSelectedStyle-CssClass and StaticHoverStyle-CssClass attributes as they simply don't do jack.

Now create the "SomeMenuClass", doesn't matter what you put in it. It should look something like this:

.SomeMenuClass
{
    color:Green;
}

Next add the following two CSS Classes:

For "Hover" Styling add:

.SomeMenuClass a.static.highlighted
{
    color:Red !important;
}

For "Selected" Styling add:

.SomeMenuClass a.static.selected
{
    color:Blue !important;
}

There, that's it. You're done. Hope this saves some of you the frustration I went through. BTW: You mentioned:

I seem to be the first one to ever report on what seems to be a bug.

You also seemed to think it was a new .NET 4.0 bug. I found this: http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t649530-problem-with-staticselectedstyle-and-statichoverstyle.html posted back in 2008 regarding Asp.Net 2.0 . How are we the only 3 people on the planet complaining about this?

How I found the workaround (study the HTML output):

Here is the HTML output when I set StaticHoverStyle-BackColor="Red":

#NavigationMenu a.static.highlighted
{
    background-color:Red;
}

This is the HTML output when setting StaticSelectedStyle-BackColor="Blue":

#NavigationMenu a.static.selected
{
    background-color:Blue;
    text-decoration:none;
}

Therefore, the logical way to override this markup was to create classes for SomeMenuClass a.static.highlighted and SomeMenuClass a.static.selected

Special Notes:

You MUST also use "!important" on ALL the settings in these classes because the HTML output uses "#NavigationMenu", and that means any styles Asp.Net decides to throw in there for you will have inheritance priority over any other styles for the Menu Control with the ID "NavigationMenu". One thing I struggled with was padding, till I figured out Asp.Net was using "#NavigationMenu" to set the left and right padding to 15em. I tacked on "!important" to my SomeMenuClass styles and it worked.