Skinning / Introduction

Understanding the skin structure:

Menu skin determines the basic “look and feel” of a Menu control. The new skinning model uses CSS classes and 'multiple CSS classes on elements' technique to apply layout to the elements created by Menu. No more xml definitions, pure css only. By default, all menu skins are located at "~/componentus/menu/skins/" directory within application directory. You can override this setting by specifying your own path through the SkinBaseUrl property. Each subdirectory within the Skins directory is a different skin. The name of the directory is equal to the skin name.

Menu has a number of pre-defined skinnable elements (menu groups, items) which have specific class names defined. Using CSS selector syntax you can override the default style and define your own custom style. Default CSS class names are defined, as follows: [SKINNAME] plus [CLASSNAME with a leading underscore] . So if your skin name is MyCustomSkin, your default CSS class names have to be: .mycustomskin_rootmenu, .mycustomskin_subitem and so on.

Skin particulars are:

  • images directory
    It contains images for the menu skin elements (items, groups, scrollers, etc). It's not allowed to rename this directory: directory name images is fixed.
  • skin.css file
    It defines the styles for the menu elements. Filename skin.css is fixed.

Skin testing:

Right-click the menu control and select AutoFormat..., select desired skin from the list and click Apply button, close editor or you can simply set the Skin property to the name of desired skin.