I would like to know if there is a way to set my sidemenu to open up to the location(urI) that the user is on, on app startup.
If the user navigates using the sidemenu it is fine, however if the app starts and the user is on a uri Eg /dashboard the sidemenu is closed.
(I have nested items Eg dashboard is within an item "All")
The menu is synchronized with the navigation. If you open some page no matter if this page is set as start or not the menu will select the item related to the current page:
Such feature (auto expand) is not supported out-of-the-box. You can use NavigationManager LocationChanged event to provide it for your case. Check also the source code of our demos - might help you as well.
Regarding the Header and footer, this is in the MainLayout and I want this to bind to a property in the different content pages, do you have some code I could look at to assist with this?
You can bind it to a global property. Just check the "Global" check box when setting the property from a page and it will be available in the layout as well.