SharePoint - Create Top Navigation menu programatically

In my previous post, I wrote about creating Quick Launch navigation programmatically . In this post, I will show how to create Top Navigation programmatically. It is easy since the code is almost the same as for Quick Launch.

Top Navigation is navigation located on the top of the screen and it is important part of almost every SharePoint site (marked in red square on the image). 

SharePoint Top Navigation

The code is very simple, it consists of reading the Top Navigation object and deleting the existing links in it. And then, after the existing Top Navigation is cleared, putting the new links which we have read from some text file.

C# CODE:

SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()

{

     using (SPSite oSiteCollection = new SPSite("http://mySiteUrl"))

     {

           using (SPWeb oWeb = oSiteCollection.OpenWeb())

           {

                 // Create the node.

                 SPNavigationNodeCollection _topNav = oWeb.Navigation.TopNavigationBar;

                 // Delete all existing items in Top Navigation

                 int _counter = 0;

                 while (_topNav.Count != _counter && _topNav.Count > 0)

                 {

                       _counter++;

                       SPNavigationNode _item = _topNav[0];

                       _item.Delete();

                 }

                 // Here we read links that will go in Top Navigation from text file

                 // Let's say that in "abc.txt" file we have links written as (title|link):

                 //

                 // My project |/sites/MyTestSite1

                 // Project documents|/sites/MyDocLib2

                 // Reports|/sites/MyCustomReports

                 //...

   

                 string _line;

                 System.IO.StreamReader _file = new System.IO.StreamReader("abc.txt");

                 while ((_line = _file.ReadLine()) != null)

                 {

                       string[] _splitStr = _line.Split('|'); 

                       string _title = _splitStr[0];

                       string _url = _splitStr[1];

                       SPNavigationNode _SPNode = new SPNavigationNode(_title, _url, true);

 

                       _topNav.AddAsLast(_SPNode);

                 }

                 _file.Close();

           }

     }

});