Setting Navigation properties on a SharePoint (WSS) Site…

Recently, I was going through setting up some sample navigation approaches for SharePoint.  The first step was in creating a bunch of Child Sites and some basic hierarchical structure. For that I used a great tool from IDevFactory called SWAT just to create some empty Team Sites. 

The one issue with that tool is it doesn’t allow setting a few options globally.

What I wanted was to have under the Navigation options to have the “Show Subsites” enabled.  In addition to a few other navigation settings.  Just as shown below:

image

 

To do that you need to access the AllProperties collection on the SPWeb object and add or update any existing entries.  What I came up with is the following:


   37 private static void SetNavigation(SPWeb childWeb)
   38 {
   39     if (childWeb.IsRootWeb == false)
   40     {
   41         SPNavigation spNav = childWeb.Navigation;
   42         childWeb.Navigation.UseShared = true;
   43         childWeb.Description = childWeb.Name + " description...";
   44 
   45         SetAllPropr(childWeb, "__IncludeSubSitesInNavigation", "True");
   46         SetAllPropr(childWeb, "__InheritCurrentNavigation", "False");
   47         SetAllPropr(childWeb, "__IncludePagesInNavigation", "False");
   48         SetAllPropr(childWeb, "__NavigationShowSiblings", "False");
   49         SetAllPropr(childWeb, "__NavigationOrderingMethod", "2");
   50     }
   51 }
   52 
   53 static void SetAllPropr(SPWeb web, string key, object value)
   54 {
   55 
   56     if (web.AllProperties.Contains(key))
   57         web.AllProperties.Remove(key);
   58 
   59     web.AllProperties.Add(key, value);
   60 }

 

The full standalone console project is located here