Context menu

dhtmlxContextMenu is a component that provides an easy way to add a contextual menu to projects. It will be of great help for frequently used actions in web sites, help systems, etc.

Related sample: Menu. Context menu initialization with config.data

Initialization

You can initialize dhtmlxContextMenu with the constructor:

const cmenu = new dhx.ContextMenu(null, {css: "dhx_widget--bg_gray"});

It takes two parameters:

• container - optional, set it to null, since ContextMenu is created inside a popup
• config - optional, a configuration object. It may contain the following properties:
  • css - adds style classes to ContextMenu
  • data - specifies an array of data objects to set into ContextMenu
  • navigationType - defines the action that opens context menu options:
    • "click" - displays the context menu option when a user clicks on it
    • "pointer" - displays the context menu option when a user hovers the mouse pointer over it

Loading menu options

dhtmlxContextMenu expects loaded data in the JSON format. Here is an example of an appropriate data set:

const dataset = [
    { 
        value: "File", 
        items: [
            { value: "New File", icon: "dxi dxi-file-outline"},                      
            { value: "Remove File", icon: "dxi dxi-delete"}        
        ]
    },
    {
        type: "separator"
    },
    { 
        value: "Edit",
        items: [
            { value: "Undo", icon: "dxi dxi-undo"},
            { value: "Redo", icon: "dxi dxi-redo"}
         ]
    },
    {
        type: "spacer"
    }
];

A data set consists of objects with configurations of context menu controls.

Like with DHTMLX Menu, options can be:

• either loaded into the ContextMenu on initialization via the data configuration property:

const cmenu = new dhx.ContextMenu(null, {
    css: "dhx_widget--bg_gray"
    data: dataset
});

• or parsed from a JSON array:

cmenu.data.parse(dataset);

• or loaded from a JSON file:

cmenu.data.load("[path_to_file]/file.json");

Showing dhtmlxContextMenu

dhtmlxContextMenu is attached to a context zone, and can be shown with the showAt() method. It takes two parameters:

element	(HTMLElement|Event|string) the element that will be a context zone: an HTML object/its id/a mouse event
mode	(string) optional, the position of showing a context menu relative to the context zone: "bottom"|"right". By default a context menu is shown at the point where the mouse pointer is.

Attaching to HTML object

This is how you can attach dhtmlxContextMenu to an HTML element:

<div id="menu"></div>

const cmenu = new dhx.ContextMenu(null, {css: "dhx_widget--bg_gray"});

document.querySelector('#menu').oncontextmenu = function(e) {    
    e.preventDefault();
    cmenu.showAt('menu', 'right');
}

• e is the mouse event.

Attaching to a mouse event

This is how you can attach dhtmlxContextMenu to a mouse event:

const cmenu = new dhx.ContextMenu(null, {css: "dhx_widget--bg_gray"});

document.querySelector('#menu').oncontextmenu = function(e) {   
    e.preventDefault();
    cmenu.showAt(e);
}