Newbie: create a clickable, grouped list/menu/whatever for items in an ecommerce site

[kbutterly]

Good afternoon, all,

Coding a small site using VS2005, SQL Server 2005 and VB. This is my
first site in ASP.net and I am getting a wee bit frustrated.

I have a sql server db with a productcategory table and a product
table, linked by productcategoryID

I want to display the items in the left hand <div>, like so

Category1Name
product1
product2
product3
Category2Name
product 4....etc..

I want the products to post back, so that the details appear in the
center <div> of the page, where the site admin can edit, insert or
delete products. the posting back I can handle, it's the generation of
the menu that's killing me.

This seems so basic, but I am going nuts to generate it. The menu
control and treeview only take sitemap and xml data sources. Since
this data is so dynamic, that doesn't seem the way to go.

This question must have been answered a thousand times, but i must be
searching on the wrong terms, because I can't find any help on this
using VB. I have found a few in C#, but even they seemed to require
that you build a sitemap table, which won't work, because it's static.

Is what I asking doable? Am I missing an obvious answer? Can I use
one of the Data server controls? Do I need to populate the menu items
dynamically, stepping through a dataset? Do I need to create a view
that will function as a sitemap table?

Can someone please point me to a resource that can help me?

Thanks,
Kathryn

 

[kbutterly]

For archival purposes and for all the other newbies out there, see:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms379604(VS.80).aspx

Look at the bottom, where they discuss menus and database data. it is
pretty clear!

Kathryn