ConsoleMenu

Provide an easy means of providing simple console applications with menu options.

Features

The following features are currently implemented in ConsoleMenu:

• Single Character Selectable Menus
  • Items are selected as simply as pressing a single character on the keyboard.
• Typed Menus
  • Given a list of objects, the item chosen will be returned to you.
• Create Automatically Numbered Menus
  • It is easy to create a menu that accepts the input from 1-9.
• Automatic Overflow
  • If using the automated number menu, if the list contains more than 9 items, the menu will automatically be paginated.

Future Features

• Make Menus Cancellable
  • At current, there is no way to go back from a menu; you must make a valid choice to revert control back to the calling code.
• Tidy up API
  • Some internal changes including the introduction of cleaner factory methods.

Examples

The easiest method of creating a menu in ConsoleMenu is to use the TypedMenu class. This class takes a list of objects that the menu will be created for, the instructional text to be displayed and a lambda that defines how to retrieve the text to display for each menu item.

To create one, simply create a new object:

var choices = new List<SimpleClass>
{
    new SimpleClass{Name = "One"},
    new SimpleClass{Name = "Two"},
    new SimpleClass{Name = "Three"},
    new SimpleClass{Name = "Four"},
};

var menu = new TypedMenu<SimpleClass>(choices, "Choose a number", x => x.Name);

The menu can then be displayed using the Display() method:

SimpleClass pickedObject = menu.Display();

An alternative method would be to create MenuItem instances manually and to add them to a new instance of the Menu class directly.

Screenshots

Here we have a very simple menu that is linked against the keys 1-4. Hitting one of these values will return the given choice.

This menu has a default value set, hitting enter will return you the value at the index notated in the brackets.

This menu has more items than can fit in the standard 1-9 numbered menu therefore an extra item has been added that will take you to the next page.

Changelog

The changelog can be viewed here.