I ran into a problem last week, where I need to update multiple sites navigation really quick by deleting and adding items to the navigation on the quick launch bar. I found this great entry from Todd Baginski: http://www.sharepointblogs.com/tbaginski/archive/2007/12/26/how-to-programmatically-customize-site-navigation-in-wss-3-0-and-moss-2007.aspx. I wanted to take this a step further by removing nodes from underneath a specific heading. Then I wanted to re-add different nodes, so that I could pull up some javascript that would change the links based on certain phrases (i.e. http://reports, http://sql/[Specific Annual Report]). Here is the sample code for the quick launch additions and removals:
SiteName = "your site name here";
using (SPSite site = new SPSite(SiteName))
{
SPWeb quickLaunchWeb = site.OpenWeb();
SPNavigationNodeCollection quickLaunchNodes = quickLaunchWeb.Navigation.QuickLaunch;
//deletes the first and second child underneath the 7th heading on the page
quickLaunchNodes
.Children.Delete(quickLaunchNodes.Children[0]);
quickLaunchNodes.Children.Delete(quickLaunchNodes.Children[1]);
//Notice that deleting any children is easy as long as you know the position...You can probably also check the children's names too and create a dynamic component and loop through the quick launch list and delete items by adding an if or for loop.
//creates 5 children underneath the 7th heading
SPNavigationNodeCollection quickLaunchNodes2 = quickLaunchWeb.Navigation.QuickLaunch;
SPNavigationNode externalSubMenuItem1 = new SPNavigationNode("Link1", "Url1", true);
quickLaunchNodes2.Children.AddAsLast(externalSubMenuItem1);
SPNavigationNode externalSubMenuItem2 = new SPNavigationNode("Link2", "Url2", true);
quickLaunchNodes2.Children.AddAsLast(externalSubMenuItem2);
SPNavigationNode externalSubMenuItem3 = new SPNavigationNode("Link3", "Url3", true);
quickLaunchNodes2.Children.AddAsLast(externalSubMenuItem3);
quickLaunchWeb.Navigation.UseShared = true;
//You only need one update statement for all the remove and adds, on first shot I accidentally added it twice and learned this lesson.
quickLaunchWeb.Update();
}
I came up with this program really quick and it was a console application. I added the first part of the site and had a console.readline statement to type in the site number, because ours were numerically based. I wanted to double check every site to see if anything was broken in other areas. If you want a quicker version, then you could probably just run any site in that specific web or read from an outside data source. For example, we have a web service that lists all the sites I could have called the web service to get the number and add/remove items from the quick launch with one go at the program. If you guys would like a script example on how to use these items that I added to the quick launch to change the links with one file let me know. I have a script that dynamically replaces specific text through the master file. I hope that you guys enjoy.