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Permanent Menus

Permanent Menus (IsPermanent equals true) have a single unique property that is not shared by any other menu: Once they are displayed, they remain visible as long as the HTML page they are within is loaded. Thus, a better name for "Permanent Menus" would be "Permanently Displayed Menus," and indeed, that is how we refer to them in much of our documentation. Do not confuse permanently displayed menus with Fixed Position / Reposition On Scroll menus; to set a menu's IsPermanent flag says nothing, in and of itself, about how the menu will be positioned on the page. Permanent menus are typically created in conjunction with the CreateOnLoad parameter; i.e., typically when you define a permenently displayed menu you will also set its CreateOnLoad parameter to true, so that it is guaranteed to be created and displayed as soon as the HTML page is finished loading.

To position permanent menus, you will typically use the TopMenuX and TopMenuY parameters. These, and many other facets of menu positioning are covered in the Menu Positioning Mini-Tutorial.

On this page, we've placed two permanently displayed menus: A horizontal menu, that is located near the top of the page, and a vertical menu to the left of this paragraph. In each case, we used the TopMenuX/Y parameters in conjunction with the HM_F_GetElementXY function provided in the version 6 loader file to load the menu at the same position as an image that we included within the HTML. Additionally, we hooked the HM_OnMenuCreated menu event hook to adjust the size of those images to match the size of the menus after the menus were created (a trick which works properly only in the later browsers). See the Menu Event Hooks mini-tutorial for further information.

Other properties to watch out for in conjunction with permanently displayed menus are ScrollEnabled and TopKeepInWindowX/TopKeepInWindowY. If you do not set these parameters properly, you may find that your permanently visible menus generate scroll bars if they cannot fit within the browser window and/or are automatically repositioned to be within the browser window if their TopMenuX/Y settings would have them placed off screen.

Finally, put some thought into whether you really need to use permanently visible menus or not. If your navigation scheme is based solely on a main permanently visible menu, then those users that visit your site with older browsers that HierMenus does not support and/or browsers in which the user has intentionally disabled JavaScript will see no menus at all (HierMenus is JavaScript based; and therefore requires that JavaScript be enabled in the browser to run properly). Therefore you should use permanently visible menus only in very tightly controlled environments, (such as a corporate intranet or something of the like) where you can be sure that your users have JavaScript enabled, HierMenus compatible browsers. Otherwise, creating popup menus is a better choice, since it allows your JavaScript disabled browsers to follow your in-page links even though the menus are not displayed.

Click the link below to have a look at the configuration file we used to generate these sample menus:

perm.js