For one of my customers I needed a top navigation which was the the same acccross their different
sitecollections, and offcourse security trimmed.
The top navigation will look like this:

So in this post I’m explaining the following :

• create a custom security trimmed sitemap provider
• deploying a masterpage accross all sitecollections
• modifying the web.config
• activating the masterpage acccross the whole site collection

The solution will look like this:

To create a custom sitemapprovider a created a sitemap file.
Just add an xml file and rename it:

The next step is to tell SharePoint that this provider exists, therefore we need to change the web.config file.
We could do this manually but if you have a large farm mmmm….
I created a feature with a receiver that does the work form:

In the code I created a method to add or delete a setting from the web.config.
When you activate your feature your web.config will look like this:

Dont mind the type property yet, we will get back on this later.
The last thing to do is to modify your masterpage.
I downloaded a version of the v4.master, renamed it and then did the changes on the copy, which is in my case ‘MUAC.master’

You need to search in the masterpage for the ‘SharePoint:AspMenu’.
Right before this control you need to place the following line:

and then you need to modify the ‘SharePoint:AspMenu’ control itself so it looks like this:

You need to change the DataSourceId to the one you just added to your masterpage.
Also change the ‘MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels’ else you will not have submenu’s.
I you now save , publish… this master page in to your SharePoint and deploy this feature you will have your menu.

But you need to manually change your masterpage on all sites … , activate the publishing features on all sites…, deploy your masterpage…
This should be done automaticilly!
So we add a new feature site scoped, this feature will only deploy the masterpage.
To do so we need to add a new module to our solution I called it ‘MasterPage’.

Remove the sample file and add your masterpage (MUAC.master) to your module.
(Right Click add existing file and then search for your altered masterpage)
Open the the ‘Element.xml’ file and modify it so it looks like this:

This module is just deploying the masterpage.
To do so we add a new feature because this cannot be combined with our first feature because that one is not site scoped but webapplication scoped.
The feature looks like this:

We have now 2 features:

• To deploy our custom sitemap
• To deploy the masterpage

Next we want that the masterpage is automaticilly set so we do not have to change every sitecollection manually.
In ourr first feature I added 2 extra methods:

Add ‘InstallMasterPage ‘ in the feature activated and the ‘UnInstallMasterPage’ in the deactivation method.
So this will activate the feature that contains the masterpage if it is their, also activate the publishing features on every site and subsite.
And next it will set the masterpage, when you deactivate it will reverse the settings again.
It just loops through all sitecollections and changes the propery of the masterpage.

This piece will acctivate our other feature that holds the masterpage, your guid will properbly be different.
You can find it in the properties of the feature, the one that contains the masterpage.
So everything is almost finished, but to make sure our topnavigation bar is security trimmed we need to create our custom Navigator class,
which has a propery called ‘IsAccessibleToUser’ which we can override:

The code is not hard to understand so I’m not going to explain eveything.
But let’s look add the code of our first feature again where we added a provider into the web.config.
This provider needs to referr to this class and asssembly because we created our own Navigator.
The type property needs to referr to our class !!!

  <add name="MUAC_CustomNavigator" siteMapFile="_layouts/MUAC.sitemap"

 type="MUAC.SiteMapProvider.CustomNavigator, MUAC.SiteMapProvider, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=02fc9494e4423234" securityTrimmingEnabled="true" />

When you now debug it should your class and checking if the user has access or not.

So that actually it, if you have questions or remarks let me know…