It is a very common occurrence to need to open a menu link in a new tab. Currently the prescribed way to do this is to create a Template for the Menu Items. This involves a lot of manual implementation  (verbose template code,  helper methods, changing the menu item object to not use the Url property so as to override the default UrlField behavior). This is a lot of extra work to accomplish a very common and simple task. 

I propose that a new property be introduced to the Menu component (to be added to Menu Items) - a boolean field that defines whether or not to open the link in a new tab (i.e. "NewTab", or "External", or something of the like). It could default to false so that, in most cases, it could be ignored. But if set to true, the Menu component would handle adding "target='_blank'" and "rel='noopener noreferer'" to the link, while leaving all of the other functionality and styling in place. 

It would greatly simplify the usage. And I would suggest that every programming who is building navigation menus would have a case where it's needed.

I would think, though I haven't looked at the core code yet, that this would be a relatively simple feature to add.   

public class MenuItem
{
    public string Text { get; set; }
    public ISvgIcon? Icon { get; set; }
    public string Url { get; set; } = string.Empty;
    public bool NewTab { get; set; } = false;
    public List<MenuItem>? Items { get; set; }

    public MenuItem(string text, ISvgIcon? icon, string url, bool newTab, List<MenuItem>? items)
    {
        Text = text;
        Icon = icon;
        Url= url;
        NewTab = newTab;
        Items = items;
    }
}

The current implementation of the component has hardcoded values for the alignment of the popup - e.g.:

    for horizontal orientation: left horizontal align and bottom vertical align
    for vertical orientation: right horizontal align and top vertical align

Ideally, those should be customizable to facilitate various use-cases.

The Menu uses the NavigationManager to go to the pages that are assigned to the individual MenuItem objects. Is there a way to pass the "force load" value to these menu items?

-------------------- ADMIN EDIT -------------------- 

You can work around the issue if you skip setting Url field of the items that you want to force load and set your own property. Then, handle OnClick of the menu items and check if this property is set and manually call the navigation manager for the URL. You can see the code for this approach below:

public List<MenuItem> MenuItems { get; set; }

protected void OnClickHandler(MenuItem item)
{
    if (item.ForceLoadUrl != null)
    {
        navManager.NavigateTo(item.ForceLoadUrl, true);
    }
}

public class MenuItem
{
    public string Text { get; set; }
    public string Url { get; set; }
    public string ForceLoadUrl { get; set; }
    public List<MenuItem> Items { get; set; }
}

protected override void OnInitialized()
{
    MenuItems = new List<MenuItem>()
    {
        new MenuItem()
        {
            Text = "site.css",
            ForceLoadUrl = "/css/site.css"
        },
        new MenuItem()
        {
            Text = "Counter",
            Url = "/counter"
        },
        new MenuItem()
        {
            Text = "Fetch Data",
            Url = "/fetchdata"
        }
    };

    base.OnInitialized();
}

I need to style the entire menu item, not just my template, but there are classes from the menu that I cannot override with my code or template.

Is there a way to not create menu programmatically but only using "html" elements ? Something like this :

 <TelerikMenu>

    <TelerikMenuItem Text="File">

        <TelerikMenuItem Text="Open" OnClick="@OnFileOpenMenuClick"/>

        <TelerikMenuItem Text="Save" OnClick="@OnFileSaveMenuClick"/>

    </TelerikMenuItem>

 </TelerikMenu>