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Structured Navigation (Publishing) not supported on "Modern" Sites/Pages/Lists/Libraries

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Creating a dedicated post to track this.  Lots of discussion on this from Yammer, and havent really seen this anywhere here yet..

 

What is the status of new "Modern" capabilities to support structured navigation?

 

What structured navigation gives us today:

  • Dedicated navigation page
  • Menu items can be permissions limited by groups
  • Visual interface to easily move up / move down / create folders

 

For years we have had users leverage this navigation structure, because it was easier for them to "grasp" and the extra features that you dont get with just the regular navigation.

 

Right now, we have almost 500+ sites that leverage structured navigation.  We have also as an organization put real emphasis on the Top Global Navigation menu, and not as much on the Left Side Navigation menu (which "Modern" seems to really key off of).

 

This is one of the items keeping us from moving toward the modern UI, so we dont have to go redesign the navigation of every site just to fit into the new modern world.

 

If we have to bite the bullet and just touch every site to make it fit in modern, it would also be nice to know that.

111 Replies

Hello @Abhimanyu Singh, I am working on creating the modern list/lib metadata filtering experience and wanted to give you some updates on the progress. Currently, we have released a feature called "filters pane"  Filters Pane Help Article.  We have just rolled out to PROD so you can expect to see it within the week if you don't already have it! 

 

This feature is the first iteration for replacing metadata nav. The next months will be focused on cleaning up the UI, supporting term set filtering, and making sure metadata nav will no longer force users to back to SP classic.   

 

Best,

Miceile 

@Sean Squires -- to be clear, you're saying the intended functionality should have the modern pages duplicate/inherit the global navigation and current navigation?  Meaning the global and current navigation should not be the same, correct? 

FYI, for those people having issues where the global and current navigation is the same, an alternative is to use managed navigation for the top level for global navigation.  It seems that modern pages DO seem to inherit the managed navigation correctly.  Yes, I know, it's not perfect but things are inherited just fine that way.

 

Hey, it's a step.............

I use managed navigation for Global in my production tenant. When I switch a single document library into Modern mode I am now correctly seeing the first level of drop-downs from each of the top level items, but not the second (normally displayed as fly-outs to the right of the drop-down items). Also, I have a very simple Alternate CSS that makes the width of the drop-downs a bit wider, adds a separation line between each drop-down item, and highlights in blue the drop-down item as you mouse over it - none of those effects are displayed when I put the document library into Modern mode. The drop-down items are highlighted in gray when I roll over them. Still, it is considerable progress!
Also, I have one term that is marked not to display in the navigation. This is obeyed in the classic view, but in the modern view it is displayed.
Thanks a lot @sean. Much appreciated. Hope the fix lands soon.
Thank you @Sean. Hope to see this fixed soon. And thank you for pinging @Miceile on metadata filtering.

Thank you @Miceile Barrett. Yes, we can see the filter pane, but that includes only a limited number of the list fields and no metadata terms. We look forward for the full metadata filtering options. It is good to know that you are working on this. 

Any idea @Sean on who to mention / ping for UI/UX (on modern lists) feedback?

@Sean Squires- I've since found more problems with the managed navigation in Global. While the navigation looks fairly normal (except for the fact that the final level of navigation, the flyouts to the right, are missing), all the links drop "/sites/SiteCollectionName/" from the URL behind them, so none work. Also, for the links displayed across the top, I have to double click on them to go to the link (which, of course, has the wrong URL). The links in the drop-downs require only a single click, but, like the others, are missing the "/sites/SiteCollectionName/" part in the middle of the URL. This is a normal tenant - nothing in first release. All using IE 11.

 

Finallly, in classic mode, hovering over any of the links shows the URL at the bottom left of the browser. In modern mode, the URLs are not shown.

 

Correct. We've identified the issue (specifically w/ the REST API to get the Navigation Provider Type) and are working on a fix (the issue is specific to structural nav from parent web (it works fine w/ managed nav). Thanks for reporting - and sorry for the inconvenience!

That's correct - thanks @Clint Lechner for posting. As noted in my other reply, we've identified the issue w/ the REST API and are working on a fix.

Thanks for reporting, Richard - we'll take a look. We validated this scenario as we intend to honor all existing settings/behaviors from classic.

@Richard Sharp - thanks for reporting - definitely not the intended behavior...appears to be a regression. We think we have identified the issue and are working on a fix. I'll communicate back to this thread as soon as I have an update.

Hi @Sean Squires, I referred to the top/global navigation on my previous post. This is currently set to managed navigation and as mentioned by someone here in this thread subsites are not available from the new top navigation. No little triangle pointing to more.  

I also noticed that headers eg Operations which do not have any URLs attached to them now have a URL attached to them. Which then point to a page not found.This should not happen as this is not happening in the classic mode either.

 

In addtion, similar to above, in the navigation on the left the "recent" header (which pretty much annoys everyone (can we remove this please!!)) and all other headers who previously has no links attached to the them, now link to our root site. Again this should not be the case.

 

Thanks

It seems that whilst latest fix has resolved a number of issues with the global navigation, including the "Page not found" link showing, it appears we are now seeing a 0 character being added to the end of each global navigation node. Additionally our global navigation appears to have stopped working completely when a user clicks on the link.

Is anyone else seeing this? We've raised a ticket with MS to investigate.

Yeah I am seeing it as well, I am still seeing the page not found link as well in my dev tenant.  Hopefully the navigation will be sorted out soon, wouldn't mind using the new lists and libraries but wont roll it out until this works as it should in my dev tenant.

 

navigation.jpg

The same thing just happened on one of our Site Collections and all Sub Sites, Global Navigation links have all been replaced with links to local items and appended with a '0' when the modern experience appears...

 

docsnew.png

 

I logged a ticket and Microsoft said they are aware. Not too happy as the issue is on our executive board's site :(

I've ended up creating a top level folder called Other and moved all of the problem pages and sites into it.

In order to do so I first had to enable Show Subsites and Show Pages under the global navigation option, that's what allowed me to see the items that shouldn't be showing up. Even though they were marked as hidden they were still visible, so by putting them under the Other Heading they are at least out of site.