What is the preferred and most efficient way to write something (or perhaps download something) that enables the menu displayed to be dependent on the user's access rights.

I want to have a main menu that contains all available menu options and maintain a user access table (in the form of a tree structure) to control which menu options are allowed for each user. When the user signs on to the system, I want to display a menu according to the rights stored on the user access table.

There must be something out there already that does this or something similar - I feel I will be reinventing the wheel if I have to start from scratch.

Sue