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# YUI Library Examples: Menu Family: Grouped Menu Items Using JavaScript

# Menu Family: Grouped Menu Items Using JavaScript

This example demonstrates how to group MenuItem instances.

Note: By default clicking outside of a Menu instance will hide it. Additionally, MenuItem instances without a submenu or a URL to navigate to will hide their parent Menu instance when clicked. Click the "Show Menu" button below to make the Menu instance visible if it is hidden.

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## Creating a Menu from JavaScript with items organized into groups

To create a Menu with no pre-existing markup on the page, call the Menu constructor (`YAHOO.widget.Menu`) passing the id of the Menu element to be created as the first argument.

Add items to a Menu instance via the `addItem`, `insertItem`, or `addItems` methods.

Items can be organized into groups by creating a multi-dimensional array of YAHOO.widget.MenuItem configuration properties and passing it to the `addItems` method.

Finally, it is necessary to call the `render` method passing the id of, or reference to the element the Menu should be appended to.

/* Instantiate a Menu: The first argument passed to the constructor is the id for the Menu element to be created, the second is an object literal of configuration properties. */ var oMenu = new YAHOO.widget.Menu("menuwithgroups", { fixedcenter: true }); /* Add items to the Menu instance by passing an array of object literals (each of which represents a set of YAHOO.widget.MenuItem configuration properties) to the "addItems" method. */ oMenu.addItems([ [ { text: "Yahoo! Mail", url: "http://mail.yahoo.com" }, { text: "Yahoo! Address Book", url: "http://addressbook.yahoo.com" }, { text: "Yahoo! Calendar", url: "http://calendar.yahoo.com" }, { text: "Yahoo! Notepad", url: "http://notepad.yahoo.com" } ], [ { text: "Yahoo! Local", url: "http://local.yahoo.com" }, { text: "Yahoo! Maps", url: "http://maps.yahoo.com" }, { text: "Yahoo! Travel", url: "http://travel.yahoo.com" }, { text: "Yahoo! Shopping", url: "http://shopping.yahoo.com" } ], [ { text: "Yahoo! Messenger", url: "http://messenger.yahoo.com" }, { text: "Yahoo! 360", url: "http://360.yahoo.com" }, { text: "Yahoo! Groups", url: "http://groups.yahoo.com" }, { text: "Flickr Photo Sharing", url: "http://www.flickr.com" } ] ]); /* Since this Menu instance is built completely from script, call the "render" method passing in the DOM element that it should be appended to. */ oMenu.render("rendertarget");

## Configuration for This Example

You can load the necessary JavaScript and CSS for this example from Yahoo's servers. Click here to load the YUI Dependency Configurator with all of this example's dependencies preconfigured.

### Menu Family Examples:

### More Menu Family Resources:

- User's Guide (external)
- API Documentation
- Cheat Sheet PDF (external)

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