Managed Metadata Driven Breadcrumb Control - SharePoint 2013

One of the new capabilities in SharePoint 2013 is Managed Navigation, which allows us to define site's navigation using Managed Metadata (Taxonomy TermSet). Managed navigation facilitates SEO optimizations as well as user friendly URLs.

This is an example of creating taxonomy driven breadcrumb.

1. First create the term set in Managed Metadata Service in central admin.

2. Then from the site settings -> navigation, select the option Managed Navigation in the Global Navigation section.

3. Select the term set for the Global Navigation

4. In Visual Studio, create a web control like below. It uses TaxonomyNavigationContext class to get navigation information for the current HTTP request.

public class TestBreadCrumb : WebControl

{

 protected override void CreateChildControls()

 {

  try

  {

   SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate

   {

    SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web;

    string siteurl = web.Site.ServerRelativeUrl;

    SortedList<int, NaviTerm> naviterms = new SortedList<int, NaviTerm>();

    int i = 1;

    TaxonomySession session = new TaxonomySession(SPContext.Current.Site);

    TaxonomyNavigationContext tnx = TaxonomyNavigationContext.Current;

    if (tnx.HasFriendlyUrl && tnx.FriendlyUrlTerm != null)

    {

     naviterms.Add(i, new NaviTerm { FriendlyUrl = "/" + tnx.FriendlyUrlTerm.FriendlyUrlSegment.Value, Title = tnx.FriendlyUrlTerm.Title.Value });

     this.GetParent(tnx.FriendlyUrlTerm, i, ref naviterms);

     // Add Home node

     naviterms.Add(naviterms.Count + 1, new NaviTerm { FriendlyUrl = string.Empty, Title = "Home" });

     this.RenderBreadCrumbs(naviterms, siteurl);

    }

   });

  }

  catch (Exception)

  { }

}

 // Recursively get parent nodes and add to the collection

 private void GetParent(NavigationTerm currentNode, int i, ref  SortedList<int, NaviTerm> terms)

 {

  NavigationTerm parentTerm = currentNode.Parent;

  if (parentTerm != null)

  {

   terms.Add(++i, new NaviTerm { FriendlyUrl = "/" + parentTerm.FriendlyUrlSegment.Value, Title = parentTerm.Title.Value });

   this.GetParent(parentTerm, i, ref terms);

  }

 }

 private void RenderBreadCrumbs(SortedList<int, NaviTerm> oaterms, string siteUrl)

 {

  string previous = siteUrl;

  for (int j = oaterms.Count; j > 0; j--)

  {

   if (j == 1) // Render last node without a hyperlink

   {

    Literal lit = new Literal();

    lit.Text = oaterms[j].Title;

    this.Controls.Add(lit);

   }

   else // Render other nodes as links

   {

    HyperLink link = new HyperLink();

    link.Text = oaterms[j].Title;

    link.NavigateUrl = previous + oaterms[j].FriendlyUrl;

    this.Controls.Add(link);

    if (oaterms[j].FriendlyUrl != siteUrl)

    {

     previous = previous + oaterms[j].FriendlyUrl;

    }

    System.Web.UI.WebControls.Label lblSeparator = new System.Web.UI.WebControls.Label();

    lblSeparator.Text = " / ";

    this.Controls.Add(lblSeparator);

   }

  }

 }

}

public class NaviTerm

{

  public string FriendlyUrl { get; set; }

  public string Title { get; set; }

}

Notes:

Root of the site does not necessarily have a term assigned to it. So check whether there a friendly URL before retrieving term information.

Home link is added separately to the terms collection.

In order to display the breadcrumb, page needs to be accessed using the friendly URL.

The breadcrumb control can be added to the masterpage with the following code snippet.

<!--SPM:<%@Register TagPrefix="TestMPControls" Namespace="SharePointTestProject1" Assembly="SharePointTestProject1, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=a382f033b49257a3"%>-->

<!--CS: Start Create Snippets From Custom ASP.NET Markup Snippet-->

<!--MS:<TestMPControls:TestBreadCrumb runat="server" Id="Test_Breadcrum">-->

<!--ME:</TestMPControls:TestBreadCrumb>-->

<!--CE: End Create Snippets From Custom ASP.NET Markup Snippet-->

We can use “gacutil -l SharePointTestProject1” command to get the assembly information. SharePointTestProject1 is the assembly name.

Once done breadcrumb will be rendered as: