Creating a TreeView JQuery Hierarchical Navigation System (
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Are you interested in adding animation effects to the drop-down menus on your web page, but afraid that it's going to take long hours of painful coding to pull it off? Keep reading. This series of articles will show you how to work some easy magic with the Treeview JQuery plug-in and a simple nested HTML list.As you may have noticed, hierarchical navigation systems are a common part of many web-based front-ends these days. Undeniably, the most typical implementation of these systems is via drop-down menus, which may contain different subcategories that users can navigate easily.
In reality, web sites that stick to the standards usually include this kind of drop-down menu in the form of nested HTML lists, which are hidden and displayed properly on screen by means of a few simple CSS styles. As long as these hierarchical structures permit users to navigate sections of a web site without sacrificing accessibility, all is well. However, this scenario may change dramatically and become extremely complex if the behavior of a drop-down menu needs to be enhanced with some kind of animation effect.
In a case like this, it’s necessary to appeal to JavaScript to create the effect, either by developing a custom application or by using a third-party library that allows you to perform this task in a truly effortless fashion. While the first option is still perfectly viable, it requires the developer to create complicated DOM-based scripts from scratch. However, there’s no need to “reinvent the wheel” in this situation, because there are numerous packages available on the web that allow us to build hierarchical navigation systems very quickly and in a unobtrusive manner.
Among the huge variety of libraries that perform this task, one of the most solid and robust solutions can be found in the TreeView jQuery plug-in. Best of all, it offers a flat learning curve. Indeed, this plug-in permits developers to build hierarchical menus whose branches can be expanded and collapsed in all sorts of clever ways, and only requires the creation of a set of standard nested HTML lists to leverage all its functionality.
Thus, in this four-part series of articles I’m going to take a close look at this useful JavaScript library, so you can start using it within your own web sites in a short time. Now it’s time to show you some functional code, so let’s learn how to build professional-looking hierarchical menus with the TreeView jQuery plug-in. Let’s get started!
