SharePoint 2013 Global Navigations links disappear when deploying SitePages from Visual Studio

Question

When I deploy a Visual Studio 2012 project with a SharePoint Module containing several Site Pages, the SharePoint 2013 website loses the configured navigation nodes for those Site Pages in the Global Navigation.

My questions are: why do they disappear and how can I prevent it?

The steps I take are:

1. I configure the navigation bar (global navigation) from _layouts/15/AreaNavigationSettings.aspx

2. The navigation looks how I want it.

3. I deploy Site Pages from Visual Studio

4. Navigation nodes are gone from global navigation:

Answer 1

I discovered the answer to my own question:

When you open up the content database in SQL Server Management studio (most commonly WSS_Content), and then open up the NavNodes table in edit modus (right click: "Edit Top 200 Rows"), you should change the following 2 columns from the relevant nodes:

• ElementType should be "1" indstead of "0"
• DocId should be "NULL"

When you deploy Site Pages again, you will notice the navigation for the deployed pages won't disappear. (If they still disappear, try iisreset in command prompt).