Category Archives: Branding

PlaceholderLeftActions – what is it?

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I’ve been doing some branding for the last week or so, and today was the turn of the left nav menu. I’ve gotta admit, I don’t like doing this – it’s complex, fiddly, and leaves me with what I call “SharePoint Branding Tourettes”.

While going through the code for the left side of the page, I came across the PlaceHolderLeftActions placeholder. By default, it’s empty.

It was a bit of a puzzle to me though – it sits just underneath the normal left navigation area of the page, and I couldn’t think of anything that puts content down there. Just to check though, I took a look in IE Explorer:

I’ve highlighted where the content goes, and you can see from the IE dev bar, there is a hidden link there (to the List Settings page, if you’re interested).

Hmm. So some stuff uses it. I tried different lists in case they all used hidden content – and fairly rapidly came across another – Wiki pages:

I guess the real annoyance here is that it is so hard to see what pages in SharePoint use what placeholders. It’s not like you can just search over the file system, even. I guess it’s a matter for experience.

Anybody else know what the PlaceHolderLeftActions is used for? I might try and build up a library.

Remove a Separator Character from the Global Links

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I ain’t dead, just flat out busy. I’m working on a branding project at the moment, which I hope to write some more about. But here’s a tricky little problem that I was struggling with.

Our customer wanted to remove the ‘Help’ and ‘My sites’ links from the Global Links in the top right of the page (the Mysite link is going elsewhere on the page), so I removed these items from my new master page. I ended up with something like this:

I’ve highlighted the problem in yellow – a spurious trailing ‘|’ character which is being used as a seperator between links. I didn’t want this though! Looking at the code in my master page, though, showed that this link was being generated by a Delegate control:

Oookay. Not sure why the default value for this is coming from a delegate control, but there you go. Let’s have a look at the code for that delegate control:

Right, so the code is held in a control template -fair enough, let’s look in there:

There we go – a literal control. I have no idea what’s putting that separator character into the literal – and I don’t want to define my own delegate control to override the current delegate control.

So what to do? Well, simple answer – I copied the MyLinksMenuControl into my master page (but without any damn asp:Literal control). All this raises two questions though:

  1. Why are some of the Global links (though not all) rendered via Delegate controls?
  2. Who thought that rendering the control with a separator was a good idea?

All in all, it seems to be absurdly complex and highly effort-filled if you want to change anything here.

Creating a SiteMapProvider for SharePoint

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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.

Setting the Master Page of a Team Site with a Feature

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Team sites don’t have the Publishing features of MOSS enabled by default, and for WSS systems, well, you don’t have them to enable. Consequently, if you deploy a master page as a feature, you’ll have a bit of fun setting it as the master page.

You can do this though SharePoint Designer, but it’s possible you don’t want your Site owners to have SharePoint Designer, or maybe you just don’t want the hassle of the second step when you provide the master page for a site. Instead, it is possible to set the Master Page through code, and to fire this using a Feature Receiver. This features shows just that – setting the master page through code. Note that to install it, you might well need to make some changes to install.bat. Continue reading →

Relative URLs in SharePoint Sites using $SPUrl

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So, I was really stuck with a Master Page that I’ve been building as a demo. This master page was for use on a site without the publishing features, such as a Team Site.

I wanted to provide a separate CSS file and an image for with this example. However, I hit a snag – how to get relative URLs to the CSS file and image that I was putting into the site?

For Publishing sites, this isn’t normally a problem – you put things such as the master page or images or CSS near the root, and then reference them from the root of the site collection. But from the subsite I was using, this proved hard.

Well, in the end I turned up this post from Ben Robb about using $SPUrl. It turns out that this works nicely for images, and for links to other content, such as CSS files:
<link id="css1" runat="server" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<% $SPUrl:~site/_catalogs/styles/mystyles.css%>" />
or
<img id="img1" src="<% $SPUrl:~site/images/badger.png%>" />

Unfortunately, it relies on the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing namespace, which means that this solution isn’t WSS friendly; certainly I couldn’t get it working. Or rather, maybe it isn’t – perhaps the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing namespace is available in WSS3, even if the publishing features themselves aren’t. Does anybody know about that?

Limiting the levels shown in SharePoint Breadcrumbs

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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.

A SiteMapPath control showing the ParentLevelsDisplayed property.

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.

Easy opening of SharePoint Designer

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A tip that much has been made of, but good nonetheless – in Internet Explorer, set the Default program for editting pages to SharePoint Designer to make life easy. Go to Tools > Internet Options > Programs > HTML Editor and select SharePoint Designer.

Configuring IE options

Then in Internet Explorer you’ll have the option to open SharePoint Designer to edit the page. And that’s what it does.

Opening the page in SharePoint Designer.

Breadcrumb Path Separator and Path Direction

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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:

Examples of various breadcrumb settings and different SiteMapProvider\'s output

(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 ” < “.

Breadcrumbs – Rendering the current link

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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.

Examples of various breadcrumb settings and different SiteMapProvider\'s output

(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.