Modifying Global Navigation Settings in SharePoint Online

Question

I am working on a PowerShell script to provision a site collection with a predefined hierarchy. Since the PowerShell breadth is so limited, most of this is done via functions that are CSOM code.

As part of this, I need to have a unified global navigation. I have been able to enable the publishing feature without problems. My issues arise when I have to step through each site and set the global navigation settings to:

1. Use structural navigation on the Rootweb, including subsites
2. In each subsite, inherit from the parent, and include subsites.

I have seen a lot of this floating around for on-prem like Powershell script to update Navigation.GlobalIncludeSubSites not applying change, I need it to work for Office 365. I can't seem to get a right handle on the publishing web and the navigation settings.

Does anyone have a definitive example or a reference to how to modify the current navigation via CSOM in PowerShell for Office 365?

Answer 1

In SharePoint 2013 was introduced a new Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Publishing and Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Publishing.Navigation namespaces in CSOM API. But unfortunately it is not supported to get/set Show subsites & Show pages navigation settings using WebNavigationSettings class since those properties are not exposed.

Having said that I propose to utilize ClientPortalNavigation.cs which represents a CSOM counterpart for SSOM PortalNavigation Class which in turn allows to get/set navigation settings including Show subsites & Show pages navigation settings.

Implementation

In order to consume ClientPortalNavigation.cs in PowerShell below is demonstrated how to implement it as a custom PowerShell snap-in.

• Build an assembly from SharePoint.Client.Navigation.PowerShell project
• Install the specified assembly using Installer Tool:InstallUtil SharePoint.Client.Navigation.PowerShell.dll
• Register Windows PowerShell snap-in:Add-PsSnapin SharePoint.Client.Navigation.PowerShell

Usage

The example demonstrates how to set SharePoint Online Global navigation Show subsites & Show pages settings via CSOM API in PowerShell:

if ((Get-PSSnapin -Name SharePoint.Client.Navigation.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null)
{
    Add-PsSnapin SharePoint.Client.Navigation.PowerShell
}
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint.Client")
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime")

Function Get-SPOCredentials([string]$UserName,[string]$Password)
{
   $SecurePassword = $Password | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force
   return New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.SharePointOnlineCredentials($UserName, $SecurePassword)
}

$UserName = "[email protected]"
$Password = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter the password"    
$Url = "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/"
$credentials = Get-SPOCredentials -UserName $UserName -Password $Password
SetGlobalNavigation -Url $Url -Credentials $credentials -IncludePages $true -IncludeSubSites $true 

References

Access and Manipulate Navigation Settings via SharePoint Client Object Model