Initialization

To add dhtmlxSidebar into an application, you need to take the following simple steps:

Download the Sidebar package and unpack it into a folder of your project
Include source files
Create a container
Initialize Sidebar with the object constructor
Load data into Sidebar

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>How to Start with dhtmlxSidebar</title>         
        <script type="text/javascript" src="../../codebase/suite.js"></script>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="../../codebase/suite.css">
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="sidebar_container"></div>
        <script>            // creating dhtmlxSidebar
            var sidebar = new dhx.Sidebar("sidebar_container");
        </script>
    </body>
</html>

Include source files

Create an HTML file and place full paths to JS and CSS files of the dhtmlxSuite library into the header of the file. The files are:

suite.js
suite.css

<script type="text/javascript" src="../../codebase/suite.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../../codebase/suite.css">

Create a container

Add a container for the Sidebar and give it an id, e.g. "sidebar_container":

<div id="sidebar_container"></div>

Initialize Sidebar

Initialize Sidebar with the dhx.Sidebar object constructor. The constructor takes two parameters:

the HTML object on the page that serves as the sidebar container
an object with configuration properties (see the full list below). If this argument is not passed to the constructor, the settings will be default

var sidebar = new dhx.Sidebar("sidebar_container",{
    // config options
});

Configuration properties

width - (number) sets the width of a sidebar, 200 by default
collapsed - (boolean) defines that a sidebar is initialized in the collapsed state
minWidth - (number) sets the minimal width of a sidebar in the collapsed state, 69 by default
css - (string) adds style classes for the component
navigationType - (string) defines the action that opens sidebar items: "click" or "pointer" (default)

Load data into Sidebar

There are two handy ways of loading data, i.e. a set of controls into Sidebar:

from an external file with the help of the load() method of tree collection:

var sidebar = new dhx.Sidebar("sidebar_container");
sidebar.data.load("../common/dataset.json");

from a local source using the parse() method of tree collection:

var data = [
    {
        type: "title",
        value: "DHTML Sidebar"
    },
    {
        type: "button",
        icon: "dxi dxi-file-outline",
        value: "save"
    },
    {
        value: "Log in",
        color: "success",
        view: "flat"
    },
    {
        value: "Log out",
        color: "danger",
        view: "flat",
    }
];
 
var sidebar = new dhx.Sidebar("sidebar_container", {css: "dhx_widget--border_right" });
sidebar.data.parse(data);

Detailed information on loading data into Sidebar is given in the article Data Loading.