Today my colleague Harmjan Greving pointed me to the Portal Navigation Properties Feature. I had never encountered this one before and as it turns out it is surprisingly undocumented by Microsoft.

So what does it do? Well, it’s a feature that comes with MOSS 2007 (unfortunately it isn’t included with WSS 3.0) that enables you to define per-site navigation settings in a declarative way. Until now I always used to write custom API code for this, that I executed from a feature receiver or a custom site provisioning provider.

The Portal Navigation Properties Feature itself is actually very simple. It contains no elements, but is only used to trigger the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.NavigationFeatureHandler feature receiver, which does the real work, based on properties you specify. It is typically used from within a site definition file (ONET.XML), like this:

...

<WebFeatures>

    <Feature ID="541F5F57-C847-4e16-B59A-B31E90E6F9EA">

        <!-- Portal Navigation Properties Feature -->

        <Properties xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">

            <Property Key="InheritGlobalNavigation" Value="True"/>

            <Property Key="InheritCurrentNavigation" Value="True"/>

            <Property Key="IncludeSubSites" Value="True" />

            <Property Key="IncludePages" Value="False" />

            <Property Key="OrderingMethod" Value="Automatic"/>

            <Property Key="AutomaticSortingMathod" Value="CreatedDate"/>

        </Properties>

    </Feature>

</WebFeatures>

...

Using Reflector I found out the following properties can be used with this feature:

¹ Please note the awful spelling error in “AutomaticSortingMathod”. Ofcourse this should have been “AutomaticSortingMethod”, but apparently someone at Microsoft forgot to run the spell checker over his/her code 😉