Custom Navigation for WSS

The navigation in WSS 3.0 has been limited. The majority of the features have been limited to MOSS 2007 due to navigation being ties to publishing. WSS gives us just enough to customize the top navigation in one layer. All though MOSS only provides two layer functionality OOB, we can acheive custom navigation in both platforms. In this article, I will cover how to add a multi-layer navigation object to WSS using lists inside SharePoint. We will be creating the menu in 4 steps. First we will create the two lists in SharePoint followed by the SiteMapProvider in Visual Studio. Then we will make changes to the web config to allow the SiteMapProvider to be used in the master page. We will then alter the menu object in the master page to use the new menu.
First we need to create two lists in SharePoint. The list names I used were “WSSTopNavigation” and “WSSDropDownNavigation”

The structure of WSSTopNavigation looks like the following:






WSSDropDownNavigation is very similar with the execption of it looks up a category from WSSTopNavigation as its link.




The SiteMapProvider can be the tricky part. Create a new project in Visual Studio. The first step is to create a project with a strong name key file and the references diagramed below:

Now create a class file named MenuProvider.cs. The following using statement will be helpful along the way.

using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls;
using System.Collections;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation;

The class will inherit from the SPNavigationProvider. This will allow us to simply the process quite a bit.
The first thing we want to do is override the GetChildNodes. I only wanted to modify the “Home” node for my solution. One thing to note is that the current nodes created by SharePoint are SPSiteMapNodes. This is internal and presents a small problem. Our new node is of the SiteMapNode. You will need to trap an type error when the GetChildNodes method executes against your new nodes. I trapped this below and returned null.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

public override SiteMapNodeCollection GetChildNodes(SiteMapNode node)
{

SiteMapNodeCollection nodeCollection;
try
{

nodeCollection = base.GetChildNodes(node);

if (node.Title == "Home")
{
SiteMapNodeCollection newNodes = GetNodesFromSharePointList(node);
nodeCollection = newNodes;
}
}
catch
{
nodeCollection = null;
}

return nodeCollection;

}

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Now all that is needed to complete the class file is to write the GetNodesFromSharePointList method. All I am doing here is building out a SiteMapNodeCollection from the two lists we created in the first step and use CAML to pull them out in position order and to tie the sub-menus to the parents.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

private SiteMapNodeCollection GetNodesFromSharePointList(SiteMapNode node)
{
SiteMapNodeCollection wssListNode;
try
{
wssListNode = base.GetChildNodes(node);
}
catch
{
wssListNode = new SiteMapNodeCollection();
}

SPWeb currentWeb = SPContext.Current.Web;
string listName = "WSSTopNavigation";
string secondName = "WSSDropDownNavigation";


if (listName != null && listName.Length > 0)
{
try
{
//Title Single line of text
//Category Single line of text
//Position Number
//NavigationURL Single line of text
//DisplayName Single line of text
//Created By Person or Group
//Modified By Person or Group

SPListItemCollection categoryItems;
SPList categoryList = currentWeb.Lists[listName];
SPList secondList = currentWeb.Lists[secondName];
SPQuery posQuery = new SPQuery();
posQuery.Query = "";
categoryItems = categoryList.GetItems(posQuery);

for (int i = 0; i < nodeurl =" categoryItems[i][" nodetitle =" categoryItems[i][" nodedescr =" categoryItems[i][" secquery =" new" query =" string.Format(">{0}", categoryItems[i]["Category"].ToString());
secItems = secondList.GetItems(secQuery);
SiteMapNode newNode = new SiteMapNode(node.Provider, "/", nodeUrl, nodeTitle, nodeDescr);
newNode.ChildNodes = new SiteMapNodeCollection();

for (int ii = 0; ii < nodesecurl =" secItems[ii][" nodesectitle =" secItems[ii][" nodesecdescr =" secItems[ii][" secnode =" new">

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can now compile your code and either GAC (global assembly cache) your DLL or stick it in the Bin file of your web application.
Now open up the web.config file in the web application folder. Find the SiteMap section and add your new provider.

This bring us to our final step. You have to change the SiteMapProvider in your master page. It should look like the following:

Now do an IISReset and bring up your new page.

Get the source code here.