Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 Bible

14.3. Working with Navigation Controls

In this section, I talk about a number of ASP.NET and SharePoint navigation controls that can be inserted on Web pages by using SharePoint Designer. SharePoint uses these navigation controls by default for its Quick Launch bar, top navigation menu, breadcrumb menus, etc. I start by helping you understand the nature of these navigation controls by showing you how they have been implemented on SharePoint sites. Later, you can use this understanding to create navigation menus on new Web pages.

14.3.1. Understanding navigation sources

To develop understanding about how SharePoint navigation controls are used in SharePoint sites, follow these steps:

1. Open a SharePoint site that uses the Team Site template. Open the default.aspx page for this site in the Split view.

2. In the Design view, hover over the top navigation menu on the default.aspx Web page. The PlaceHolderHorizontalNav content region is highlighted and shows the Common Tasks arrow.

3. Click the arrow to open the Common Content Tasks menu and then click Create Custom Content. The content region for editing on the default.aspx Web page opens.

4. Click the top navigation menu in the PlaceHolderHorizontalNav content region. The following code is highlighted in the Code view:

   <SharePoint:AspMenu
        ID="TopNavigationMenu"
        Runat="server"
        DataSourceID="topSiteMap"
        EnableViewState="false"
        AccessKey="<%$Resources:wss,navigation_accesskey%>"
        Orientation="Horizontal"
        StaticDisplayLevels="2" MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels="1" ...