---
title: Active Items
weight: 1
---

## Manually Activating Items

All items have an `isActive`, `setActive` and `setInactive` method. The last two allow you to manually determine whether an item is active or not (by default all items are inactive).

```php
Menu::new()->add(Link::to('#', 'Active')->setActive());
```

```html
<ul>
    <li class="active">
        <a href="#">Active</a>
    </li>
</ul>
```

If a child item is active, the parent will be considered active too:

```php
Menu::new()->add(
    Menu::new()
        ->add(Html::raw('<a href="#"><img src="/avatar.jpg"></a>')->setActive())
);
```

```html
<ul>
    <li class="active">
        <ul>
            <li class="active">
                <a href="#"><img src="/avatar.jpg"></a>
            </li>
        </ul>
    </li>
</ul>
```

## Automatically Determining the Active Items

The `Menu` class also has a `setActive` method, but it behaves differently than the method on `Link` and `Html`. It accepts a url or a callable as it's parameter, and will use that to determine which underlying items are active.

### Determining the Active Items With a Url

By providing a url you can set all links that contain or are equal to the url as active. Mixing absolute and relative url's isn't an issue either.

```php
Menu::new()
    ->link('/', 'Home')
    ->link('/about', 'About')
    ->link('/contact', 'Contact')
    ->setActive('https://example.com/about');
```

```html
<ul>
    <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
    <li class="active"><a href="/about">About</a></li>
    <li><a href="/contact">Contact</a></li>
</ul>
```

If your base url isn't `/`, you should provide a request root to improve the active url matching.

```php
Menu::new()
    ->link('/nl/', 'Home')
    ->link('/nl/about', 'About')
    ->link('/nl/contact', 'Contact')
    ->setActive('https://example.com/nl/about', '/nl');
```

<div class="alert -info">
Html elements won't ever be set active automatically since they don't have a dedicated url property.
</div>

Calling `setActive` with a url will recursively traverse through submenus.

### Determining the Active Items With a Callable

If you want more control over which items you want to set active, you can use a callable that returns a boolean.

```php
$menu = Menu::new()
    ->link('/', 'Home')
    ->link('/about', 'About')
    ->link('/contact', 'Contact')
    ->setActive(function (Link $link) {
        return $link->segment(1) === 'about';
    });
```

```html
<ul>
    <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
    <li class="active"><a href="/about">About</a></li>
    <li><a href="/contact">Contact</a></li>
</ul>
```

<div class="alert -info">
If you only want to iterate over a specific type of item, you can typehint it in the callable, and it will ignore other instances.
See <a href="/docs/menu/v3/items-in-depth/manipulating-items">Manipulating Items</a> for some examples.
</div>

The callable will not traverse through submenus. If you want to traverse deeper, you'll have to manually add a `setActive` call with a callable that typehints `Menu`.

## Active Items Class

By default, the parent element of active items will receive an `active` class. If you'd like to override the class name, you can do so with `setActiveClass`.

```php
Menu::new()
    ->setActiveClass('is-active')
    ->add(Link::to('/', 'Home')->setActive());
```

```html
<ul>
    <li class="is-active">
        <a href="/">Home</a>
    </li>
</ul>
```

If you want to apply the active class on the `a` instead of the `ul`, call the `setActiveClassOnLink` method when building your menu.

```php
Menu::new()
    ->setActiveClass('is-active')
    ->setActiveClassOnLink()
    ->add(Link::to('/', 'Home')->setActive());
```

```html
<ul>
    <li>
        <a href="/" class="is-active">Home</a>
    </li>
</ul>
```