Richard's Rant

Lenovo W510 Review - How Australia gets Cheated by Overseas Companies

US Price on US Site: 3609.00 (AUD 4031.05 at time of writing)

AU Price on AU Site: 8239.05

Really Lenovo? Really?

This is just one example of how overseas companies have a field day here in Oz. Dell. HP. Apple. Microsoft. They all do it and we stand by and let it happen.

What a sad and sorry state of affairs.

ASP.NET SiteMap Tomfoolery

So today I was mucking around with the ASP.NET SiteMap for a client web site that we are creating. One of the things that we wanted to use was the SiteMap, as it is an easy win and means that we do not have to muck about with the navigation.

So I created a site map as below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<siteMap xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/AspNet/SiteMap-File-1.0" >
    <siteMapNode url="~/default.aspx" title="FVR Data Entry Home"  description="FVR Data Entry Home">
        <siteMapNode url="" title="Administration">
            <siteMapNode url="~/Admin/FVRAdmin.aspx" title="FVR Data Admin"  description="FVR Data Admin Home" />
            <siteMapNode url="~/FVRDataEntry.aspx" title="FVR Data Entry"  description="FVR Data Entry" />
        </siteMapNode>
        <siteMapNode url="" title="FVR Management">
            <siteMapNode url="" title="New..."></siteMapNode>
            <siteMapNode url="" title="Edit"></siteMapNode>
            <siteMapNode url="" title="FVR Definitions">
                <siteMapNode url="" title="New"></siteMapNode>
            </siteMapNode>
        </siteMapNode>
    </siteMapNode>
</siteMap>

You will notice that the nodes that are just placeholders have empty URLs. Now to me, this is logical. That is, there is *no* URL that the node corresponds to: it merely acts as a tree node that holds child nodes.

Imagine my frustration when it did not render the nodes that had no URL’s, and as a consequence, the child nodes.

So off to Google –but no luck. Even MSDN is vague (if not downright secretive) about how to do this.

I eventually tried something on the off chance that it would work:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<siteMap xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/AspNet/SiteMap-File-1.0" >
    <siteMapNode url="~/default.aspx" title="FVR Data Entry Home"  description="FVR Data Entry Home">
        <siteMapNode url="~/#0" title="Administration">
            <siteMapNode url="~/Admin/FVRAdmin.aspx" title="FVR Data Admin"  description="FVR Data Admin Home" />
            <siteMapNode url="~/FVRDataEntry.aspx" title="FVR Data Entry"  description="FVR Data Entry" />
        </siteMapNode>
        <siteMapNode url="~/#1" title="FVR Management">
            <siteMapNode url="~/#1.1" title="New..."></siteMapNode>
            <siteMapNode url="~/#1.2" title="Edit"></siteMapNode>
            <siteMapNode url="~/#1.3" title="FVR Definitions">
                <siteMapNode url="~/#1.3.1" title="New"></siteMapNode>
            </siteMapNode>
        </siteMapNode>
    </siteMapNode>
</siteMap>

Lo and behold. It worked.

So chalk that one up for trying something that I thought would never work.