Using menus and toolbars

The cfmenu and cfmenuitem tags let you create vertical menus and horizontal toolbars.

Define menus and toolbars

• Use a single cfmenu tag to define the general menu characteristics.
• Create a horizontal (toolbar) menu or vertical menu by specifying a cfmenu type attribute value of horizontal or vertical.
• Menus can have submenus, but only the top menu can be horizontal. All children of a horizontal menu are vertical.
• The top-level menu shows initially, a submenu shows when the user moves the mouse over the menu root in the parent menu.
• Use cfmenuitem tags to specify individual menu items.
• To create submenus, nest cfmenuitem tags. The parent tag becomes the root of the submenu.
• All cfmenuitem tags, except tags for dividers, must have a display attribute, which defines the text to show on the menu item, and can optionally have an image attribute.
• A horizontal menu has dividers between all items. You place dividers in vertical menus by specifying a cfmenuitem tag with a divider attribute.
• To make a menu item active, specify a href attribute with a URL or a JavaScript function to call when the user clicks the menu item.
  The following example shows a simple horizontal menu with submenus that uses JavaScript to change the display contents. When the user selects an end item in a menu, the text in the div block below the menu shows the path to the selected menu.

Styling menus

The cfmenu and cfmenuitem tags have several attributes that let you easily control the menu appearance. These attributes consist of two types: basic and CSS style. Basic attributes, such as the cfmenu tag fontColor attribute, control individual menu characteristics. CSS style attributes let you specify a CSS style specification for a whole menu or part of a menu. The following information describes how the CSS style specifications interact and affect the menu style. For descriptions of all style-related attributes, see the cfmenu and cfmenuitem descriptions in the CFML Reference.
The cfmenu and cfmenuitem tags provide a hierarchy of CSS style attributes that affect different parts of the menu. The following table describes these attributes in hierarchical order:

In addition to these styles, consider any style-related attributes, such as bgcolor, that you set on the cfmenu tag. 
When you design your menu, keep in mind the following issues:

• Keep font sizes at 20 pixels or smaller. Larger sizes can result in menu text in vertical menus exceeding the menu boundaries.
• Consider how the style attributes interact. Because each menu and submenu consists of a surrounding menu area and individual child items, be careful when you choose background colors. For example, if you specify different background-color styles in the cfmenu tag's menuStyle and childStyle attributes, the menu items are one color and the surrounding menu area are a different color.
  For an application that shows some of the effects of menu style attributes, see the example in the cfmenuitem tag in the CFML Reference.
  ColdFusion attributes provide most style options that you are likely to require. However, you can, if necessary, modify the basic menu styles for all menus by editing the menu-related styles in the CSS files in the yui.css file. This file is located by default in the web_root/CFID/scripts/ajax/resources/yui directory. For more information about these styles, see the [Yahoo!
  User Interface Library menu documentation|http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/menu/].