Content deployment un-hiding navigation items?

Question

SharePoint 2007 Enterprise, SP2, no post-SP2 CUs.

We have a pretty standard staging -> production content deployment job that runs nightly to move over any new or modified content that had been approved. Yesterday, it was discovered that when we configure the global (top) navigation settings to hide a subweb or page, when that page is deployed to prod, the navigation setting is set back to unhidden.

Is there any way to work around this, or configure content deployment to account for this, or is this just a limitation of content deployment in MOSS 2007?

Answer 1

The hiding / unhiding of menu items is dependant on the settings in the import. Doing an import with RetainObjectIdentity=true keeps the menu items hidden.

The relevant code of the CDP APIs are as follows:

SPExportSettings exportSettings = new SPExportSettings(
    new Uri("http://source"), @"c:\temp");
SPExport export = new SPExport(exportSettings);
export.Run();

SPImportSettings importSettings = new SPImportSettings(
    new Uri("http://target"), path);
importSettings.RetainObjectIdentity = true;
SPImport import = new SPImport(importSettings);
import.Run();

Answer 2

I think this is a limitation of content deployment. The navigation settings are tied to the current SPWeb object, and I think (correct me if I'm wrong) the CD API only moves content (pages, list items & documents) rather than properties of SPWebs.

Answer 3

Variations use the content deployment system too, see Point 10 for a few stsadm commands

http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2008/04/fun-with-variations.html