Have you wondered how you can get the Quick Launch to display fly out menus, similar to the Top-Link bar drop-down menus? It can be done with just a few small tweaks to the Master Page.

If you open up your default master page in SharePoint Designer and search for the following block, this is where you’ll edit:

<asp:AspMenu
  id="QuickLaunchMenu"
  DataSourceId="QuickLaunchSiteMap"
  runat="server"
  Orientation="Vertical"
  StaticDisplayLevels="1"
  ItemWrap="true"
  MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels="1"
  StaticSubMenuIndent="0"
  SkipLinkText=""
>

By default, the highlighted portions are set to “2” and “0” respectively, by setting them to “1” it gives us the fly out functionality we were looking for, pretty cool!

The problem I ran into after getting this to work is the “fly out” container consists of a white background; no border and it seemed to inherit the font-color from my custom style sheet. That’s fine, or so I thought. Being that the background of my site is also white, it made it very difficult to see the fly out menu easily. I thought I could easily set the background via the CSS sheet like anything else, boy was I wrong!

After some searching, I found several people with the same problem and no easy fix; until I came across an MSDN article. Basically it showed that by applying the Tag to the SharePoint:AspMenu portion of the master page you could apply formatting to the “fly out”.

So I added that and at first I was following a blog post that said you could use something like to apply styles to the menu, I tried that and could not get it to work so I instead used the MSDN article and applied the formatting directly in the master page, and then I coordinated it with the CSS sheet to make sure the styles matched. Here is my DynamicMenuStyle code chunk after formatting:

<DynamicMenuStyle

      backcolor="#FFFFFF"

      forecolor="#0066cc"

      borderstyle="Solid"

      borderwidth="2"

      bordercolor="#0066cc"

/>

After doing that I now have working, branded fly out functionality for both the Top Link Bar and Quick Launch Bars on my MOSS site.