UltimatePanel - ASP.NET Side Panel Bar

ASP.NET Side Panel Bar

Create elegant side bars in no time

C# and VB applications with source code

32 samples ready to use in your solution

Native builds in .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.5, 4.0

Get all 4 editions with your purchase

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ASP.NET Side Panel Bar - Download Your Free Trial

UltimatePanel is an ASP.NET server control to build collapsable side panel bars. You can either use one of the samples as your template, or build your own from scratch. You can either display content or navigate your website by using these accordions. Includes:

Side Panel Bar — Create professional yet functional designs for your visitors. Present your content and navigation in an intuitive and professional format.

Built-in Visual Designer — Build your panel using the visual designer. You can either run the designer as a standalone web application, or run it from inside Visual Studio.

Life-Saver Samples — Use the provided C# and VB samples as your templates. Copy the most appropriate sample into your web application, and go live as quickly as possible.

All .NET Editions in One — Native builds in .NET 1.1 (Visual Studio 2003), .NET 2.0 (Visual Studio 2005), .NET 3.5 (Visual Studio 2008) and .NET 4.0 (Visual Studio 2010) provided in one package.

Top 10 Features of Karamasoft UltimatePanel for ASP.NET

1. Fully integrated into Visual Studio
2. Visual designer as a standalone tool
3. Display accordion style boxes
4. Drag boxes and rotate content
5. Scroll vertically and horizontally
6. Save/restore panel state on client
7. Show/hide panel to save space
8. Multi-level, treeview, slip, filter
9. Insert ASP.NET and HTML controls
10. Server-side and client-side API

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Complete Feature List for Karamasoft UltimatePanel

PanelSource — You can set the source of the panel to an XML file at design-time or run-time, or to an XML string at run-time.

DataBinding — You can set the source of the panel to a database connection string and panel id at design-time or run-time, or to a dataset that you created from a database by using ADO.NET at run-time.

UserRights (DataBinding) — Using the DataBinding techniques you can easily display different sets of panel items per user depending on their privileges by only making a simple join operation on your panel and user tables. As a matter of fact you will have the power and flexibility to load your panel from as many tables as you want based on your implementation needs.

UserRights (Properties) — Using the CurrentUser, CurrentUserSessionVar and AllowedUsers properties you can display different portions of the same panel to different users. When you set the CurrentUser to the name of the user logged into your website panel control will check his name against a comma separated list of users defined in the AllowedUsers property of each item.

ClientPersistenceAll — The previous version was only keeping the group states (open or close) and their positions (for draggable groups). The new version keeps the states of all items inside each group. Therefore if you have a treeview structure inside your groups and the user opens some of the subgroups in those groups their states will be saved and loaded from the last visit.

ShowHide — You can set the ShowHide property to True to make your panel invisible on either side of the browser window. It automatically creates an additional item near the panel, and when the user moves the mouse over this item the panel gets displayed. When the mouse is moved out of the panel area it gets hidden again. You can also set the ShowHideOnClick property to True to let the user click on the additional item to show/hide the panel rather than moving mouse over and out of this item.

Overlay — You can set the PanelOverlay property to let the panel open over IE windowed controls such as select boxes and ActiveX controls. The panel will partially cover these controls rather than hiding them altogether.

HotKey — You can set a hotkey (shortcut key combination) to a panel item so that the user can press that combination to activate that item as if it is clicked by mouse. This keyboard support might also be helpful for disabled users who can learn the shortcut keys to operate and navigate your website.

AutoGroupHeight — You don't need to set the GroupHeight property of each group any more. When you leave it blank the control will automatically adjust its height based on the items in it.

DisplayTypes — Display property of a group can be set to AlwaysOpen, AlwaysClosed, InitallyOpen or InitiallyClosed.

ItemStatus — You can display text at the status line of the browser window when the mouse is over each panel item.

MultiLevel — You can have as many hierarchical levels as you want in your panel groups. In fact each group might hold a different tree view structure so that you can have multiple tree views inside one UltimatePanel control.

MultiPanel — You can have as many UltimatePanel controls as you want on a web page. Each control will have its own source to render.

MultiGroupOpen — You can have multiple groups open simultaneously. This is the default characteristic of the panel. You can click a group header to open the group underneath, and click again to close it.

GroupDrag — You can drag and drop the groups by clicking on the group header and moving the group to change its position in the panel hierarchy. The user might change your panel structure dynamically to get a better user experience. IE5+ only.

ClientPersistence — You can save and load the latest state of the panel on the client machine so that when the user revisits your website or refreshes the web page the panel will appear as in the last visit. This is a very useful feature to keep the user preferences alive in terms of open and closed groups, and their positions after drag operations. IE5+ only.

GroupSlip — You can create panels in which a group slips when the user clicks on the group header to open or close it. The speed of the slip operation can be customized by setting the SlipIncrement and SlipTimeout properties accordingly.

AutoFillFrame — You can use this feature so that when the user drags the frame border or the window border to make it larger or smaller the panel automatically fits the size of the frame both vertically and horizontally.

AutoScroll — You can set AutoScrollVertical and AutoScrollHorizontal properties to automatically scroll the panel vertically and horizontally when the user scrolls the page. The speed of the scroll operation can be customized by setting the AutoScrollTimeout, SmoothIncrement and SmoothTimeout properties accordingly.

Vertical Scroll Bar — When the items inside a group take more space than the group height a vertical scrollbar appears automatically. The style of the scrollbar can be modifed by setting the scroll styles inside the group CSS class.

AdjustHeightOnItemClick — When you have multiple hierarchical levels such as in tree view you can set this property of the group to automatically increase/decrease group height when you expand/collapse the items inside that group. Therefore the group height will adapt itself according to its open contents rather than displaying a vertical scroll bar.

ServerControl — You can set the item type to ServerControl if you want to insert a server control (asp:control) or a combination of server and HTML controls into the UltimatePanel control on a web form (aspx page). You can use this method to locate all sorts of HTML structures and server controls including UltimatePanel itself in a nested form as well as the UltimatePanel control for an ultimate navigation experience. You can also put data listing controls such as DataGrid, DataList and DropDownList, and bind them to a data source such a SQL database or an XML stream as can be seen in the provided samples.

HideScrollBars — You can hide horizontal and vertical scrollbars of a group on purpose. These scrollbars automatically appear around a panel groups unless you set the HideScrollBars property of the group to True. This property should be set to True when you insert an UltimatePanel control into your group, which will pop up subpanels outside the panel area. Otherwise, it will try to open the subpanels inside the group area and they would be invisible if they can't fit into the group.

Filter & Transition — Most common filters and transitions are available to create more sophisticated panels for better user experience. IE5+ only.

Marquee — You can have content rotation with the help of this feature. Contents of each group can be scrolled in four directions, and the speed can be adjusted with the provided parameters. Groups to be rotated might have either regular items or HTML content. IE5+ only.

HtmlContent — You can set the HtmlContent property of a group to a string of HTML tags, and it will override the items in that group to display the HTML content as is.

Frames — If you don't want to put the panel on every web page (even though it is very common to put the panel control into a user control to be inserted into all web pages) you can locate your panel into a navigation frame and set the TargetFrame property to the name of the frame to open your web pages in.

Highlight Path — When you set the HighlightPath property of your panel to True, the selected item and its group header will be highlighted. Item and group header might have different select styles. The selection is handled automatically by finding the item in the panel, which has the same URL as the current page. This feature doesn't work with frames because it is not possible to get the page info in another frame from the current page on server-side.

PathFindingMethod — You can select the method to find the navigation path. It can be either MatchPathAndQuery or MatchPathOnly. Default is MatchPathAndQuery, which tries to match item's URL with the current page's URL including the path and the query string. MatchPathOnly discards the query string and tries to match only the path portion of item's URL with current page's URL.

SelectedItemID — You can override the automatic matching process handled by setting the SelectedItemID. If HighlightPath is True and SelectedItemID is left blank, UltimatePanel tries to find the selected item by using either MatchPathAndQuery or MatchPathOnly algorithms. However, if SelectedItemID has a value UltimatePanel will not attempt to find the selected item automatically but it will instead use this value as the selected item, and find the navigation path starting from this item and traversing the hierarchical panel up to the top.

GetNavigationPath — This public method gets an argument, PathDelimiter, and returns the navigation path. It gives you the ability to display a panel path to illustrate to the user his current position in the hierarchial panel structure.

SetItemAttribute — This public method gets item id, attribute name and attribute value, and changes the value of the specified attribute of the specified item.

BaseURL — You can set the virtual path to be added as a prefix to every ItemURL. Note that "/" is not required at the end of the virtual path. If omitted, UltimatePanel will handle it accordingly. Items may override this value if they have a URL property that starts with an absolute path starting with '/' or 'http://' or 'file://', or including a '\' in it. Also note that if the item has a URL starting with '~' it will automatically replace '~' with the application path.

Panel Position — By default, the panel will appear at the position where you drag-and-drop the control. However, you may use the Left and Top properties to set the absolute position for run-time.

Relative Positioning — You don't need to do anything special for relative positioning. When you drag-and-drop the panel control into a table cell, it will automatically position itself relative to the table cell you locate it in.

Nested Controls — You can insert ASP.NET server controls and HTML controls into menu items.

Client-Side Events — When the user clicks an item, a JavaScript function can be called in addition to redirecting to a URL.

Server-Side PostBack — When the user clicks an item, a server-side event can be raised, which will return a postback value to server.

XML & CSS — Menu structure and style based on XML and CSS industry standards.

Compliancy — XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant.

Cross-Browser Support — IE4+, NS6+, Mozilla 1.0+, Opera 7.5+.

System Requirements — Windows 2000/2003/2008/XP/Vista/7, IIS 5.0+, ASP.NET 1.1/2.0/3.5/4.0.
.NET 1.1 edition has limited features and support as Microsoft doesn't support that framework anymore. Please test the product in your target framework in order to make sure it fulfills your needs.

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Online Documentation

Server-Side Developer API
Visual Designer Interface

Client Testimonials

Karamasoft has also been very helpful in not only support, but in assisting in design and concept. If you are looking for a professionally written and tightly integrated web control library we highly recommend their products to you.

Johnathan Rossitter
Budget Prepay Inc.

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I don't think I can say enough about Karamasoft. Karamasoft produces incredible software, sells it at a reasonable price, and most of all, backs it up with fantastic support. Personally, it has been worth much more than I paid.

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Tri-Lakes Marketing

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