Display three different levels of navigation from wp_nav_menu separately?

Question

I have a three level nav setup using Wordpress menu creator.

Structure:

A
—1
——Y
——Z
—2
—3
B
C

I wish to display each level of the navigation alone, in different areas of the page. With current items highlighted.

On pages A, B or C I want to display: A B C
(I can use wp_nav_menu with depth=1 for this)

On pages 1*, 2 or 3 I want to display: A B C and 1 2 3
On pages 1*, Y or Z I want to display: A B C, 1 2 3 and Y Z

Are there any easy ways of displaying the second and third level navs for the currently selected menu item?

The important thing is that I need to be able to display each "level" menu individually.

Thanks

Answer 1

What I ended up doing was setting up three sidebars, each using an instance of Advanced Menu Widget and settings as follows:

Sidebars
1. main nav: start at level 0, display 1 level deep, display all items
2. second level nav: start at level 1, display 2 level deep, only show strictly related sub items
3. third level nav: start at level 2, display 3 level deep, only show strictly related sub items

This gives me pretty much the control I needed.

Answer 2

You could maybe try getting the list of items and building it out yourself if you really need some more control, without the complexities that the Walker class involves.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_get_nav_menu_items

Answer 3

The easiest way is to override the walk() method in your custom walker when using wp_nav_menu

For a reference, see the code inside the walk() method inside the Walker_Nav_Menu class. That code first separates all top level menu items & puts all the submenu items separately. There you can further separate them out to use different start_el functions or outputting some other random html