Declarative OnQuickLaunch property not working in SharePoint 2013

Question

I have a question about the OnQuickLaunch property in SharePoint 2013. I've created a new SharePoint 2013 project in Visual Studio with a document library List instance in it. All I have is an elements.xml that looks like this.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <ListInstance Title="List" 
            OnQuickLaunch="TRUE" 
            TemplateType="101" 
            FeatureId="00bfea71-e717-4e80-aa17-d0c71b360101" 
            Url="Lists/List" 
            Description="My List Instance">
  </ListInstance>
</Elements>

I've set the OnQuickLaunch property to true but if I deploy my solution, the list isn't on the quick launch.

Is this a bug in SharePoint 2013, or am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

Sorry for posting this as an answer, but I can't post replies yet. :(

I have the exact same problem, only some lists appear under the "Recent" node. I too declare the list to appear on the quick launch the same way, but when I check the list settings the "Display this list on the Quick Launch?" setting is set to no.

I think this behavior is new to SP2013, since I can't remember ever having this problem before.

If someone has a quick fix I'm all ears. Otherwize I guess there are some not-so-good solutions, such as adding a list event receiver for the ListAdded event and setting the property through code. Quite a hassle for something that should just work though.

EDIT:

Actually I think I have an answer now.

Speaking with a colleague of mine, he had the same problem a short while ago. He found that adding the list instance in the onet.xml instead of using a list instance did the trick. Because when adding list instances in the onet, SharePoint uses a different kind of element which has the "QuickLaunchHeading" attribute. This attribute is not present in the ListInstance element. So in the configuration element, you could add lists like so:

    <Lists>
        <List Title="MyList"
              Type="101"
              Url="MyUrl"
              FeatureId="MyFeatureId"
              OnQuickLaunch="TRUE"
              QuickLaunchHeading="TRUE"/>
    </Lists>

There are some drawbacks to this though. You cannot be sure of the order in which stuff is provisioned, so you cannot activate a feature which is depending on the list. Just to clarify I haven't tried this yet, so my answer may not be 100% complete, but I will try it soon though. :)