Creating "External" URLs in the Quick Launch menu

This post was prompted by the problems I've been having trying to get header nodes to be added to a site when it is provisioned, which have a custom URL pointing at a different site in the site collection.

Despite the NavBar element in the onet.xml having a URL attribute, this had no effect on my quick launch and it was always created using the current web's URL (i.e. on click it just took me straight to the current web site home page).

So, I embarked on a simple feature which I could use to create those navigation headers.

The code is pretty simple:

public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
        {
            // get the current "Web" object
            using (SPWeb web = (SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent)
            {
                    // create the new navigation node
                    SPNavigationNode newNode =
                        new SPNavigationNode("Go to any sub site", "/anysite/anysubsite", true);

                    // add the node to the quicklaunch menu
                    web.Navigation.QuickLaunch.AddAsLast(newNode);

                    // save the changes
                    newNode.Update();
            }
        }

Now, the main thing to note is that when you create your SPNavigationNode object to use the true argument in the constructor!

This tells SharePoint that the URL is an External URL (and by External .. I mean "not in the current web"). If you don't set this then you will get an error telling you that the URL is invalid, or that the page/file cannot be found.

Even if the URL is a relative URL to the same site collection, you still have to set this value to true! Not entirely obvious that one, so one to watch out for.