Andy Burns’ SharePoint Blog

SharePoint List items all have a Title column (although it’s display name might be changed to something else). This Title column is a string, which is unfortunate as sometimes you really don’t need a string column on a list; this was the need I faced.

You can make a Title column not required:

Also, if you go to the ‘Advanced Settings’ page of your list and ‘Allow management of Content Types’ you can then go into your content types and Hide the Title column. This is okay – but the Title column is still there – it’s just being displayed with “(no title)”… Read more »

Tags: Breadcrumbs, jQuery

As I’ve described before (and repeatedly bemoaned!) some page layouts hide the page level breadcrumb and display their own. Worse – they don’t all do this in the same way! All of this continues to feed my idea that you shouldn’t use any of the OOB publishing sites if you can help it.

However, sometimes we don’t have that luxury (i.e. I’ve never had that option) – so what do those crazy out-of-the-box page layouts do with their breadcrumbs? Well, Martijn Molegraaf has been kind enough to provide a chart. Nice one. And I feel your pain.

Tags: Breadcrumbs

Right, so SharePoint uses pages and page layouts – I won’t talk about the different types, but ask a couple of questions that’ve come up a few times.

• If I create a new page layout in SharePoint, how do I get rid of the breadcrumbs?
• How can I get breadcrumbs, but like the home page?

Here’s how… Read more »

Tags: Breadcrumbs, Page Layouts

I was tempted to call this “The incredible case of the bust rendering of SharePoint pages”, but it seemed a bit long, to be honest. This is a bit of a detective story (and if I’d the developer who built this in the first place, there’d be a murder) so stick with me… Read more »

Tags: CSS, Error, JavaScript

Interesting stuff about creating a SiteMapProvider on ‘Tomblog’ (but Tom who?)

Note 1 - I guess he inherited from SPNavigationProvider or SPXmlContentMapProvider as SPSiteMapProvider and SPContentMapProvider are both sealed.

Note 2 - He doesn’t mention caching. I kind of wonder how that would work.

Still, interesting stuff – might have a look sometime as part of my ‘one breadcrumb only’ campaign.

Tags: Navigation

This was such a good question, I thought I’d reply in a post about it:

I am trying to limit the depth of the breadcrumbs. I have a sub sub sub subsite that I want breadcrumbs to show from that site and down one more level. I can make the breadcrumbs invisible using SPD but I wonder if I can make them limited … like we could in WSS 2. - Jo Arnspiger

Well, there are a couple of ways that spring to mind (there are many approaches, but these are probably the best two) – one that uses SharePoint Designer, and one that uses SharePoint’s own navigation configuration.

First off, let’s look at the SharePoint Designer route. If you go to your master page or page layout, you’ll see an ASP control called the SiteMapPath control. It has a property called ParentLevelsDisplayed.

Set that to a number, and that should be the maximum number of levels shown. If you set it to -1, it will show however many levels there are, which is it’s default. (I’ve not tried it, but I’m pretty sure that’s the case). That’s probably what you want, but there is a problem – it’s not just your master page which defines the SiteMapPath control. There is one on most of the Publishing Page layouts that come out of the box too. Still, if you’re happy taking a little time to change all of them, then that’s probably fine.

The other problem is a little more fundamental – this setting will apply across your entire site collection. Well, okay, maybe not, but it’ll apply for all pages using that master page or page layouts…

Alternatively, you could change the Site’s navigation settings to get what you want. At the ‘sub sub sub subsite‘ you could change the site’s navigation setting to not inherit it’s top navigation settings from the parent site. This will add a level to the ‘Global Navigation’ breadcrumb, but also make all URLs below the ‘sub sub sub subsite‘ start at that level. See my previous article for an explanation.

The down side about this approach, though, is that it means all of your top navigation tabs will change – you really are breaking with the ‘navigation context’ of the parent site. (That’s my term – I didn’t know what else to call it.) There is an example of this on the article linked to above.

A final note, these approaches do have two slightly different results – the first route is a ‘only show the last X items’, while the second is ‘chop all breadcrumbs below this site to start here’.

Anyway Jo, I hope that one of those is suitable.

Tags: Breadcrumbs, Navigation

There are several settings you can apply to breadcrumbs in MOSS, although really some of these are really ASP.NET settings rather than most specific. Previously I’ve mentioned using different SiteMapProviders and rendering the current location as a link. Let’s have a look at another couple of settings:

(Yes, this screenshot shows some other settings – they’re mentioned in the other articles)

Looking at the screenshot we can see how the Path Separator setting allows us to set what we want shown between nodes – rather than ” > ” I’ve used “:”. Not sure when/why you’d want to change that, but I’m sure I’ll be given a design where that is useful sometime!

There’s also the Path Direction setting, which allows us to set whether the breadcrumb should have the current node on the left or right of the breadcrumb – hence the two settings, RootToCurrent and CurrentToRoot. Note, though, that the default path separator doesn’t swap from ” > ” to ” < “.

Tags: Breadcrumbs, Navigation

So one of yesterdays posts brought up a question about rendering the link to the current site. This sort of set me investigating.

There are a number of settings you can use with the ASP:SiteMapPath control. One is the RenderCurrentLink option. This defines whether the current location indicator in the breadcrumb should be shown as a link.

(Yes, this screenshot shows other settings – I’ll discuss them in other posts)

Looking at the top 4 rows you can see the effect of the the RenderCurrentLink option – it determines whether the last item is displayed as a link or not.

Tags: Breadcrumbs, Navigation

I’ve written about this before, but really it was just an addendum to another point I was trying to make. It might be worth bringing out as a post in itself.

ASP.NET navigation controls take data from a navigation provider, and render it into HTML. The breadcrumbs used in SharePoint use the one navigation control, but give it different navigation providers…

… the point relevant to whether or not the “> Pages > default.aspx” is displayed in the breadcrumbs is the SiteMapProvider. The CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode provider doesn’t seem to include the ‘Pages’ bit of the path – hence it is used by the page layouts. The Default.master’s SPContentMapProvider provides a breadcrumb that includes the ‘Pages’.

So, if your page is using a breadcrumb such as…

<asp:SiteMapPath id="ContentMap" SiteMapProvider="SPContentMapProvider" SkipLinkText="" NodeStyle-CssClass="ms-sitemapdirectional" runat="server"/>

… then your breadcrumb will include the “> Pages > default.aspx”. Note that this is the default content of the breadcrumb in default.master. Thus, if you’re creating a brand new page layout, you’ll probably want to override that content using an ASP.NET Content control something like this…

<asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderId="PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb" runat="server">

<asp:SiteMapPath ID="siteMapPath" SiteMapProvider="CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode" RenderCurrentNodeAsLink="false" SkipLinkText="" NodeStyle-CssClass="ms-sitemapdirectional" Runat="server"/>

</asp:Content>

This code defines a content control that overrides the default content for the Title Breadcrumb. It uses the CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode (nice name!) navigation provider, and so won’t show the “> Pages > default.aspx” bit in the breadcrumb.

So, in short, when you’re creating a new Page Layout, make sure you override the Title Breadcrumb with something that uses the CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode provider.

Tags: Breadcrumbs, Navigation, Page Layouts

I upgraded the version of WordPress I’m running recently and I enabled statistics on the blog. It’s been a bit of an eye-opener. My posts on ‘What the heck is going on with SharePoint Breadcrumbs‘ and ‘More SharePoint Breadcrumbs WTF‘ have together more hits that any of my other articles, and both are visited about evenly.

This is pretty interesting. Breadcrumbs should be pretty simple. I mean, we all use them on the web, probably every day, and often without noticing. So how come people are clearly looking up information about SharePoint breadcrumbs? Clearly something is wrong with them.

So this set me thinking – what’s wrong with them? And here’s what I could think of:

• There are two breadcrumbs. You’ve got the Global breadcrumb, and then the PlaceholderTitle breadcrumb. Seriously, how many websites do you come across that have two?
  
• ‘Site’ levels of the hierarchy can appear in one or the other breadcrumb. Depending on whether or not your navigation inherits it’s navigation from it’s parent site, the ‘Site’ links can appear in the global or title breadcrumbs. Thus, there’s no consistency as to where a site appears – if it appears at all! I can see why it’s been built this way – essentially it allows us to ‘skip’ levels in the site hierarchy as shown on the global breadcrumb, and it shortens the title breadcrumb. I wonder if this wouldn’t be better facilitated by a ‘show in Global breadcrumb’ site setting. Or just show all sites in the path to the site?
• Why is what is shown in the breadcrumbs tied to what is shown in the site’s top navigation? That’s just confusing.
• Having some breadcrumbs in the Page Layout (i.e. in the main content area) and others coming from the master page is just plain confusing.

I don’t quite know what the answer to this is; after all, we need a way to navigate back up the site hierarchy, though we might not always want to allow that. And breadcrumbs could get very long, so yes, maybe we want to skip levels. But I think I’d be tempted by showing all sites in the Global navigation. This would also divorce the breadcrumb from the top navigation settings, and I think would be easier.

And if the Global navigation gets too long? Well, that seems quite possible. In that case, how about a setting on each site to ‘Display in Menu in the Breadcrumb’ to give something like this:

This way you can still have your ‘Main’ sites in the hierarchy, but all levels are still available. Of course, you might want to make it that all the subsites of last ‘Main’ site are always visible irrespective of that setting. I think that would work, and would require less getting used to.

It’s a bit like the Vista breadcrumb in Windows Explorer – but a bit different, which might count against it…

That said, I’m open to thoughts from others! Comment if you’ve got an idea of how breadcrumbs should work!

Tags: Breadcrumbs, Navigation