TreeView in Arabic

In the Q&A after my ASP.NET talks at MDC, someone asked whether the new ASP.NET 2.0 TreeView control can render nodes and subnodes in languages that read from right to left like Arabic. I tried testing this by dropping a TreeView control and looked for *some* property that would let me use character sets that read right-to-left, but didn't find anything close. So I forwarded this question onto Goldfarb, who forwarded it onto Brad Millington, who forwarded it to the person that owns testing the Treeview, and as it turns out this is possible (and that we do test for it) but it's not an inherent property in the Treeview control.

Aside: Almost everyone at Microsoft is on email *all* the time, so while it may seem like a convoluted process to get three or five or ten degrees of indirection to get a question answered, it could be as short as five minutes for a fully-validated response with VP approval. I love this company :)

So how do you do it? Rather then setting a property on a control, you set the “dir“ property on the page, (or to be more specific the body) which will then render the content right to left. But what if you wanted to have multi-directional content on a single page, like a navbar that is right to left in arabic, but content that is left to right in English? And what if you didn't want to use frames (floating or otherwise)? 

Step 1 Define a navbar/master page

Create the nav bar the same way you always would, in <td></td>, <span></span>, <div></div> or whatever tags you use for positioning, and set the dir property in the <td>,<span> or <div> tags to “rtl”.

Step 2 Define the content area for the page

Create the content area for the page and set the dir property to “ltr