SharePoint 2013’s master pages do not, by default, show breadcrumbs. SharePoint 2010 had reduced them to a fly-out menu (which was nice, as it used up less page space):
SharePoint 2013 doesn’t have them at all:
However, they can be restored… Continue reading “Add Breadcrumbs back into SharePoint 2013”
This is a reminder of a couple of problems that I’ve come across a few times – that the breadcrumbs in LAYOUTS pages and central admin are a bit tricky.
Breadcrumbs in Layouts pages are driven by an XML file in your IIS web app. Now, you can add entries which are merged into that – a described by Jan Tielens’ Adding Breadcrumb to application pages in SharePoint – the easy way. However, this doesn’t cover the whole problem – he goes on to describe dealing with Central Admin too.
However, the really tricky bit of this that though we can define our own sitemap.xml file, it’s kind of hard to merge with the existing one. Specifically, the problem is that to merge ‘our additions’ and the ‘existing file’, we have to call a function ApplyApplicationContentToLocalServer, and as brilliantly described by Sean McDonough, the word ‘local’ is a problem in this method – it only forces a merge of the files on one server. Not much use in a server farm.
Sean’s article describes his attempt at a fix – using a one-time timer job, and a fair bit of reverse engineering of the ApplyApplicationContentToLocalServer function. Also, it seems like Vince Rothwell has come up with a similar solution, so it’s likely that this is a good approach.
A real pain to have to build so much to do such a simple task, though.
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)”… Continue reading “Using jQuery to fix the removal of the Title column of a list”
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.
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.
Here’s how… Continue reading “Build page layouts without Breadcrumbs or a Title”
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… Continue reading “Corrupt Breadcrumbs in the in PageAreaTitleFrame”
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.
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.
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 ” < “.
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.
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