Adding a hidden page with site definition

Question

I want to add a page to my site definition which is hidden ie. doesn't appear in the navigation, by default.

The page is provisioned in the onet.xml file as follows;

<File Url="SomePage.aspx" Type="GhostableInLibrary" Path="default.aspx">
    <Property Name="Hidden" Value="TRUE" />
    <Property Name="Title" Value="Some Page" />
    <Property Name="ContentType" Value="$Resources:cmscore,contenttype_welcomepage_name;" />
    <Property Name="PublishingPageLayout" Value="~SiteCollection/_catalogs/pagelayouts/mypagelayout.aspx, My Page Layout" />            
</File>

As you can see I have tried setting a property of Hidden but this seems to have no effect. Is there any way to set the page to be created in the site but not shown int he navigation. I have relatively limited experience with site definitions so am probably approaching it wrong?

UPDATE: I decided to approach this a different way and "simply" hide the navigation item in a feature event receiver run when the site is provisioned. However this turns out to be far from simple.

At first I tried to access the Navigation of the SPWeb

((SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent).Navigation.TopNavigationBar;

But this is a null reference. So I created a PublishingWeb from the web and looked in there

PublishingWeb pw = PublishingWeb.GetPublishingWeb((SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent);
pw.Navigation.GlobalNavigationNodes;

But this is also a null reference. Some searching on Google turned up this article - http://blog.mastykarz.nl/programmatically-configuring-menu-items-sharepoint-2010/ - which explains that the navigation is not populated until it is first updated through the UI and provides a fairly low level powershell solution to populate this navigation by creating a fake SPContext, grabbing a PortalSiteMapProvider and getting the navigation from there. I rewrote this into my feature receiver and have code looking like this:

        SPWeb web = (SPWeb) properties.Feature.Parent;
        PublishingWeb pw = PublishingWeb.GetPublishingWeb((SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent);

        HttpRequest request =  new HttpRequest("", web.Url, "");
        StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
        HttpResponse response = new HttpResponse(sw);
        HttpContext.Current = new HttpContext(request, response);
        SPControl.SetContextWeb(HttpContext.Current, web);

        ProviderSettings ps = new ProviderSettings("CombinedNavSiteMapProvider", "Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c");
        ps.Parameters["NavigationType"] = "Combined";
        ps.Parameters["EncodeOutput"] = "true";
        PortalSiteMapProvider psmp = (PortalSiteMapProvider) ProvidersHelper.InstantiateProvider(ps, typeof(Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider));
        PortalSiteMapNode current = (PortalSiteMapNode) psmp.CurrentNode;
        SiteMapNodeCollection nodes = current.GetNavigationChildren(NodeTypes.Default, NodeTypes.Default, OrderingMethod.Manual, AutomaticSortingMethod.Title, true, -1);

Alas the nodes collection is empty. I have tried using the GlobalNavSiteMapProvider and the CombinedNavSiteMapProvider with the same results. However when the receiver finishes the site does indeed have navigation items.

This seems like such a basic requirement that nearly every SharePoint development would need; some deployable control of navigation.

Is this really the way we are supposed to do this? Is there not a simple solution? And if it is the recommended way does anybody know why the nodes collections are always empty for me?

Answer 1

Provision the file not to a doc library but to a folder (or even to the root folder of the site, where default.aspx lives). It will be all but invisible from the web interface(unless you create a nav link), however it will be visible to site admins via SharePoint Designer(if they know where to look).

Answer 2

After revisiting this problem several times and wasting much time on trying to find a resolution I have resorted to a small piece of custom Javascript which updates the menu on page load to hide and add items as required.