When adding context menus to large data structures like a <table> or large list (<ol> or <ul>), it is recommended to bind a single YAHOO.widget.ContextMenu instance to the structure's root element, than to a set of its child nodes (<tr>s or <li>s). Doing so significantly improves the performance of a web page or application by reducing the number of "contextmenu" event handlers as well as the number of YAHOO.widget.ContextMenu instances in memory.

Begin, by creating an <table> and giving <tr> elements that should have the same context menu a similar class name.

Next, create an object literal that maps each class name to a set of MenuItem configuration properties.

Use the onContentReady method of the Event utility to instantiate the ContextMenu as soon as the elements whose "contextmenu" event trigger its display are ready to be scripted.

Lastly, add a "beforeShow" event handler to the ContextMenu instance. This event handler makes use of the "contextEventTarget" property to determine which <tr> element was the target of the "contextmenu" event. Once found, the <tr> element's class name is used to look up its corresponding menu items in the "oContextMenuItems" map, which are then added to the ContextMenu instance via the "addItems" method.