Navigating the Site

Navigation is an important part of any site, which helps the user go to any page of the web site from the home page. Because this application is based on e-commerce, we will definitely have links such as Products, View Cart, and Order, which directly takes the user to the requested page. As discussed earlier, we have three types of users for our application: Administrator, Manager, and Customer. The Administrator and Manager have similar kinds of privileges, except that the Administrator has control over all the Managers, and the Customer shops at the site to purchase products. Therefore, we have designed a Menu control that helps the respective user in navigating the site.

The Menu control is a new control in ASP.NET 2.0 that requires a SqlDataSource or XmlDataSource to bind the data to the control. If we specify a SqlDataSource to it, the Menu control, by default, looks for a Web.sitemap file, which has all the menu items listed. This Web.sitemap file is an XML file that has siteMapNode tags holding the menu item in the attributes url, title, description, and so on. But the problem we have is that we have two different sets of navigational items—one each for Administrator/Manager and Customer—and we have defined two sitemap files, Admin.sitemap and Customer.sitemap, which are described next: