Case about sorting the quick launch navigation

Many things are easy to do in SharePoint. Considerable stuffs are tricky. And a few – difficult/impossible. One such tricky stuff is customizing navigation (both quick launch and top navigation).

Recently, I had an internal request regarding customizing quick launch navigation nodes. There are a few good articles out on the internet that talks about leveraging what’s provided via SharePoint OM in terms of customizing/manipulating navigation nodes. But I didn’t see one (perhaps I am still not an expert in www.live.com search) that talks about sorting navigation nodes in some order.

After considerable research, I realized the best way to go about this would be “back-to-basics”. Arrays, ArrayLists, HashTable did not seem to be able to gel well with SPNavigationNode[] object. If you try “cast”, it will work with Array, ArrayList types, but you’ll hit a roadblock when trying to use Sort() method these types expose.

So, below is the “bubble-sort” algorithm that sorted this case out:

using System;

using System.Collections;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.ComponentModel;

using System.Data;

using System.Drawing;

using System.Text;

using System.Windows.Forms;

using Microsoft.SharePoint;

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation;

namespace SortNavigation

{

    public partial class Form1 : Form

    {

        public Form1()

        {

            InitializeComponent();

        }

        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

        {

            using (SPSite site = new SPSite(" <your sharepoint site url> "))

            {

                using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())

                {

                    try

                    {

                        SPNavigationNodeCollection nodes = web.Navigation.QuickLaunch;

                        for (int i = 0; i < nodes.Count; i++)

                        {

                            if (!(i == (nodes.Count - 1)))

                            {

                                for (int j = nodes.Count; j > i; j--)

         {

                                    if (!(j == (nodes.Count)))

                                    {

                                        if (nodes[i].Title.CompareTo(nodes[j].Title) > 0)

                                        {

                                            nodes[i].Move(nodes, nodes[j]);

                                            web.Update();

                                        }

                                    }

                                }

      }

                        }

                    }

                    catch (Exception _e)

                    {

                        textBox1.Clear();

                        textBox1.Text += "Error occured in navigation sorting process" + System.Environment.NewLine +

                            System.Environment.NewLine + "Error: " + _e.Message + System.Environment.NewLine +

                            System.Environment.NewLine + "Stack Trace: " + _e.StackTrace + System.Environment.NewLine;

                    }

                }

            }

      }

    }

}

Finally, a piece of advise when working with SharePoint – Don’t forget the basics!