Optimize menus to improve building speed

There are two optimization techniques you may want to know when designing your menus:

Technique 1:

You can increase the menu-building speed if you use the same appearance in both the [Mouse Over] and [Mouse Click] Item States.

This is possible if you check the "Ignore [Mouse Click] values" option inside the Optimization tab, found at:

Tools-> Project Properties -> Compile Properties-> Optimization

In most menu designs, clicking on an item just opens a page inside the same window. Therefore the [Mouse Click] state will only be observed for a second or so. In these cases, checking the "Ignore Mouse Click State" box can be a very good idea.

On the other hand, if you have medium-sized menus that appear very quickly you may not want to lose the flexibility of a 3rd item state. Obviously, there is a performance/features tradeoff here and you are able to choose what fits you best.

Note: If you want to use this optimization technique for your final, compiled menus, it is important that you keep the respective box checked prior to compilation.

Technique 2:

As a general rule, prefer to create more submenus with a few items (no more than 12 or 15) than create less submenus with a lot of items.

This is a feature that solves a bug of Internet Explorer (only) when combo boxes (or other Form Elements) exist on page.

It appears that Internet Explorer shows combo boxes above submenus by default, something that does not occur on any other browser. In that case you should check this option, which adds code in the compiled javascript to cure the problem.

Note that this solution adds a small delay in the appearance of submenus, as additional code needs to be executed due to the Internet Explorer bug.

You could alternatively move the combo boxes from the area where the submenus appear. If this is not feasible by your design, check the related option and the problem will be fixed despite the small delay in the appearance of submenus.