Review Author: Steve Hebert
I have been working with the telerik r.a.d. menu ASP.NET control recently and thought I’d take a moment to write a brief review. Before digging into the product details, I’ll take a step back to look at my own criteria when creating this review.
The ideal component for me is one that gives me solid cross-browser support. They provide the testing and upgrade support and I just buy the functionality and role it in. The other ideal is that it works easily and I can quickly understand their object model to integrate it within my code and application structure. Matching the ideal with the reality of 3rd party implementation is the biggest test of these types of controls.
If you’ve written your own menus, especially pop-up style menus, you quickly appreciate the task of writing menus. You have to deal with issues ranging from spacing differences between browser products to windowed controls (i.e. list boxes) that insist on displaying over the top of your menus. The windowed control problem is even an issue on large sites like MSNBC where they have not resolved this correctly – sometimes you float out the left-hand nav and it gets covered up by one of their windowed controls on the page. Running with IE 6 and Firefox, the developers at telerik have solved this problem – I cannot speak to the other browsers at this time, however this is the type of thing that makes third party controls so appealing.
Another area to review on these types of controls is their impact on client page size. This includes looking at the actual code being generated within the browser and looking at the referenced script files. In this review, I’ll take a look at the r.a.d. menu product capabilities, developer support, client code size and licensing options.
Capability Overview
R.a.d. menu provides a number of menu generation options and they provide ample code examples; this includes options like XML-bound generation where you hand an XML document to the control to code-behind menu generation. Other options are also include static menus, data binding and templates, but I did not test these scenarios. The r.a.d. menu control also performs formatting through CSS files that the developer can control and maintain - this was one of my leading concerns as I didn’t want to buy into a menu product that creates their own structure or perhaps takes control of the styles internally. The control provides an interface to automatically apply style sets to the accompanying css file to ease management for the developer. The required css classes are also concise and easily understandable for the menu styles I used.
The telerik product also provides a wide range of menu styles including horizontal, vertical, popup, scrollable, context-sensitive and others. The latest version supports a wide range of client- and server-side events and also supports server-side caching. The company also mentions the control is “Section 508” compliant for accessibility.
Web Browser Support
As of the time of this writing, telerik supports the following browsers with the r.a.d.menu control (please review the list at their website before buying as this could be updated at any time):
Internet Explorer 5.0 or later
Internet Explorer 5.2 (Mac)
Netscape 7.0+
Mozilla 1.0+
Firefox 0.8+
Konqueror (Linux)
Safari 1.2+ (Mac – without context menu support)
Opera 7.5+
Please note that I have only tested with IE6 and Firefox so far.
Developer Support
Telerik’s first layer of support is their website. They have a considerable amount of information that is easily searchable on their site. I was pleased to see that they have RSS feeds for keeping aware of new releases and fixes that are available. Their knowledge base is easily searched and I’ve found the steps they list to be concise with some decent code samples to explain certain approaches. The support articles I browsed have a consistent format to make reading easier.
Online Support and Support Instances
I have not yet had the need to create a support instance with telerik. They have three different levels of support: bronze, silver and gold. Bronze assures 72 hour turnaround, Silver assures 48 hours turnaround and Gold assures 24 hours turnaround. Bronze is granted to all trial users, Silver to the individual product licenses and Gold to the r.a.d controls and r.a.d. navigation subscription licenses. There are several other details to the support detailing things like ‘issue escalation to the development teams’, but I’ll leave the explanation of these to their site .
Code Size and Effect on Pages
For these numbers I am using code-behind to dynamically generate my menu structure in the Web UserControl. Because there are slight differences with respect to page size given the use of a UserControl (11 bytes), I have taken steps to ignore these size overheads across the board. Keep in mind that URLs and labels are part of these numbers, so taking these numbers as direct bearing on the telerik code may be misleading.
The first thing I noticed is that when I include the telerik code and look at the resulting page source, there are 8 javascript includes (i.e.