Hiding navigation nodes in WSS dynamically

Question

The SPNavigation property IsVisible only returns true. I have seen a lot of posts on the net stating the same thing. I know there is a way of hiding the nodes in MOSS using the PublishingWeb class, the problem I have is that we are using WSS which does not have microsoft.sharepoint.publishing.dll.

Is there a way of hiding navigation nodes in WSS dynamically?

Answer 1

Not without writing your own sitemapprovider. I once tried setting the same properties using a WSS site that MOSS uses in it's navigation, including BlankUrl (header) and Target (open in a new window) but they didn't work because the wss sitemapprovider doesn't pass those properties when it converts the node from a SPNavigationNode to a SiteMapNode. I ended up writing my own sitemapprovider that reads the spnavigationnodecollection and passes the properties through. Here's a snippet of my code:

protected SiteMapNode SPNavigationNodeToSiteMapNode(SPNavigationNode spNode, SPWeb web)
{
    if (spNode == null) return null;

    SiteMapNode node = NewSiteMapNode("sid:" + spNode.Id.ToString(),
    								  spNode.Url,
    								  spNode.Title,
    								  web.ServerRelativeUrl.ToLower());
    if (spNode.Id == ROOT_ID ||
    	spNode.Id == ALT_ROOT_ID)
    {
    	node.Url = "sid:" + spNode.Id.ToString();
    }

    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty((string)spNode.Properties["BlankUrl"]))
    {
    	node.Url = string.Empty;
    }

    foreach (object key in spNode.Properties.Keys)
    {
    	switch (key.ToString())
    	{
    		case "Title": break;
    		case "ID": break;
    		case "ToolTip": break;
    		case "Expanded": break;
    		case "NavigateUrl": break;
    		default:
    			node[key.ToString()] = spNode.Properties[key].ToString();
    			break;
    	}
    }

    return node;
}