Hi Hector,

I also have been using navigation, except I'm gathering info from the Links list and creating a menu from that. It does ok but 2 problems - 1) the column title appears on the webpart (whereas I want the field values of the column to appear as the 1level of the menu, then the URLs as 'hoverover'; and 2) can't quite get it to work for 2-level 'group by'. As a reminder, the Links list allows 2 levels of grouping. So some users are using 'category' then sub-category' or 'chapter' and 'section' to indicate a 2 level of categorization of the links.

hoping much success!!!

Tony Willeto

I had to use SPSite mySite = new SPSite(this.CurrentSite.Url + pNode.Url), because pNode.Url = "\". This was causing an error "UriFormatException: Invalid URI: The format of the URI could not be determined."

I had to switch two arguments of the SiteMapNode constructor to become SiteMapNode childNode = new SiteMapNode(this, listUrl, listUrl, list.Title).

I could not just add a child node of type SiteMapNode to the collection, as this caused a casting error (could not cast from SiteMapNode to PortalSiteMapNode) downstream. I could not cast one to the other in code either with an explicit case or using the 'as' keyword, since this generated an exception at runtime stating that 'Value of value may not be null'. I tried to use base.AddNode(navnode, pNode), but it generated a 'Not implemented' exception. Through experimentation I came up with the following, which allows the code to run fine, though I am not confident that it produces the results the author of this article intended:

                    SPSite mySite = new SPSite(this.CurrentSite.Url + pNode.Url);
                    SPWeb currentWeb = mySite.OpenWeb();
                    SPListCollection lists = currentWeb.Lists;
                    foreach (SPList list in lists)
                    {
                        string listUrl = list.DefaultViewUrl;
                        SiteMapNode navnode = new SiteMapNode(this, listUrl, listUrl, list.Title);
                        PortalWebSiteMapNode pwsn = pNode as PortalWebSiteMapNode;
                        if (pwsn != null)
                        {
                            PortalSiteMapNode psn = new PortalSiteMapNode(pwsn, listUrl, NodeTypes.Area, listUrl, list.Title, "My description");
                            nodeColl.Add(psn);
                        }
                    }

                    return nodeColl;

Since no one has posted anything here, I would be interested to know if this is simply the result of a difference in configuration between what I have and what was used to produce the sample, or due to a difference in the final MOSS 2007 product from the beta, or ...

Tony,

I actually struggled with this quite a bit until I noticed your post. I got the error UriFormatException, and would be interested to know how you narrowed it down to the line of code containing pnode.Url (SharePoint has not been easy for me to debug)

My code worked right away because I was using the asp:SiteMapProvider control in my page layout. When I tried to change it to

<PublishingNavigation:PortalSiteMapDataSource ... /> 

I got the same error "could not cast from SiteMapNode to PortalSiteMapNode. I fixed the problem approximately as you described, and once again paid closer attention to your post to realize you already ran into the same problem. Ultimately my code looks nearly the same as yours.

One difference is if you use PortalSiteMapNode as the first node you don't have to prepend the CurrentSiteURL

I recently needed to display the same left navigation for a publishing site at every point from a certain web and below. A neat way I discovered was by using StartFromCurrentNode="false" and setting StartingNodeOffset.

   <PublishingNavigation:PortalSiteMapDataSource ID="SiteMapDS" Runat="server"
    SiteMapProvider="CurrentNavSiteMapProvider" EnableViewState="true"
    StartFromCurrentNode="false" StartingNodeOffset="3" ShowStartingNode="false" />

By putting this code in the master page, webs and pages from the third level down within the site's topology are always shown for any page or layout attached to that master page. SharePoint knows to display the nav links in context of where you are in the site.

If you use this code sample, be aware that the SPSite and SPWeb objects are not being properly disposed and you could experience memory and resource utilization issues under load. See the following article for more information: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa973248.aspx

I tried subclassing PortalSiteMapProvider. I added new assembly to GAC and to bin folder of web site. Then I added following line to web.cofing:

<add name="NSiteMapProvider" description="HK provider" type="HKSharePoint.CustomNavProviderWithList, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=1b81fcc045e68c0d" />

I got error:

0x1438 Windows SharePoint Services General 8sl1 High DelegateControl: Exception thrown while adding control 'Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapDataSource': System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: The given assembly name or codebase was invalid