Question

I am building a pop-out menu, and the client wants it to be able to pop out continously based on a heirarchy.

For example, the first pane is a list of options. When they are hovered over, another pane should pop up next to it with the next level of options, and so on until the last level of options is reached.

I can handle all the javascript and stuff, but I can’t think of a way to continously embed repeaters inside repeaters. I know I could do it once by putting a repeater inside another, but then I would only have two layers.

I need to be able to continously embed repeaters for each layer of options, or achieve this with a similar technique using a different control.

Any help is great, thanks!

Answer 1

You won’t be able to build this in mark up. You’ll have to add the controls dynamically in your code behind by building the Repeater for each level and adding it to the previous Repeater’s template. It will require a full postback for each option selected because the nested Repeater could potentially be of different depth depending on which option is chosen.

You might be better off doing this all client-side, though, using AJAX and javascript. When an option is chosen, fire off an AJAX request to see if that option has sub-options. If it does (return them), then dynamically build the new options control using javascript and add it to the page. When a different option is chosen, you’ll remove the elements from the DOM holding the previously chosen options sub-options.