How to add items to fly out menus?

Question

I have enabled the fly out menus for the quick launch menu on one of my SPS 2010 sites by changing the value of the MaximumDisplayLevels for the Quick Launch Menu control. My current configuration looks like this:

<SharePoint:AspMenu 
id="V4QuickLaunchMenu" 
runat="server" 
EnableViewState="false" 
DataSourceId="QuickLaunchSiteMap" 
UseSimpleRendering="true" 
UseSeparateCss="false" 
Orientation="Vertical" 
StaticDisplayLevels="1" 
MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels="1" 
SkipLinkText="" 
CssClass="s4-ql" />

I have learned that some of the menu items will require more than just the one dynamic menu level. As far as I understand, I should be able to change the value of MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels in order to accomplish this task. The problem that I am encountering is that I am not aware how to actually populate these levels past the first dynamic level. Thus far, I have been using the Navigation page of the Site Settings in order to set the links in the Quick Launch menu. But it doesn't appear that after changing the MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels that you can add more headers than before.

What am I doing wrong? Do these levels need to actually be coded elsewhere?

Answer 1

Yea, you are on the right path but unfortunately the ootb pages for generating the quicklaunch or top nav structures only allow 1 or 2 levels of depth. I had to write my own application pages that allow me to have unlimited levels of depth.

In addition, the default SPNavigationProvider doesn't seem to allow navigation items that don't have a url or if you want them to open in a new window. For this I also wrote my own SPNavigationProvider that I use when I use my own application pages.

So with a feature activation, which I call "Advanced Top Navigation" or "Advanced QuickLaunch", I change out the navigationprovider and remove the existing links under site settings to manage the navigation and replace them with links to my custom application page that allows deeper navigation structures.

It seems to work well with our end users.