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Menu

The Menu is a control that presents its items similar to how a standard native popup menu would except with ribbon styling.

Screenshot

A popup for a SplitButton that contains a Menu with three items on it

The ribbon Menu control is an ItemsControl that is intended to be used exclusively on popups for other controls. It presents its items using alternate templates that look like menu items.

For instance, when a ribbon Button is added to a Menu, the button draws and behaves just like a regular menu item in Office.

Valid Child Controls

Almost all of the interactive controls can be used in a Menu. These include:

The PopupButton and SplitButton controls can be used to provide "sub-menus" since they also have popups that can hold more Menu controls with items.

Using Other Controls in Menus

Due to flexible design of Menu, any sort of small non-ribbon control can be added as a menu item to a Menu control.

The really neat feature of this is that you can even assign an image and label to any non-ribbon control. This is accomplished by assigning attached properties from RibbonControlService.

Screenshot

A Menu containing the DateTimePicker control, which is defined in the Shared Library

The first property that needs to be assigned is RibbonControlService.IsExternalContentSupportedProperty. This property should be set to true so that the control being added aligns correctly with the text portion of the menu item. If it is false (the default), the control will span the entire width of the Menu and will cover the image column.

Second, you may optionally assign the RibbonControlService.LabelProperty and RibbonControlService.ImageSourceSmallProperty properties. If you don't assign them, the control will be aligned with the left size of the other menu item labels. If you assign a label, the label will appear under other menu item labels and the control will appear immediately to the right of it. If you assign an image, it will appear in the image column.

This code shows how to add a native WPF TextBox to a Menu:

<TextBox MinWidth="100" ribbon:RibbonControlService.IsExternalContentSupported="True" 
	ribbon:RibbonControlService.Label="Native TextBox" />

Child Control Minimum Widths

When certain controls like a TextBox that can expand width based on content are added to a Menu, be sure to set their MinWidth property. This ensures that a minimum width is applied to the control and that the control will expand if there are other longer controls around it.

This concept is not needed for controls like Button since those controls automatically fill the width of the Menu.

Adding Access Keys to Menu Items

When any sort of ribbon button (Button, PopupButton, etc.) is used in a Menu as a menu item, an underline will appear under a character in the menu item's label if the control's KeyTipAccessText property has been set to a single alpha/numeric character and that character appears within the control's label. While the menu is displayed the access key can be typed to execute the default action on the control.

For instance, a PasteButton that had a label of Paste and a KeyTipAccessText of P would have the P in Paste underlined.

Controls with Popups that Can Use Menu

There are several built-in ribbon controls that have popups. The Menu control is most often used as the popup content for the PopupButton, SplitButton, and RibbonGallery controls.

Since Menu is a regular control, more than one Menu can be used on the same popup. By making the popup content a Panel and adding two Menu controls to the Panel (generally with a Separator in between), you could have a popup with two columns of menu items.