SOLVED

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

Thanks @James Brennan - a regression has resulted in several UI issues w/ this build. We have postponed and rolled-back until we can get fixes in place. I'll keep this list apprised of that progress. Apologies for the inconvenience - and thanks for your patience!

Adding @Jeremy Coleman, @Matty Vasquez, @bart vermeersch, and @Marc Wenning for notice - thanks all for the prompt reports. We've identified the issue and have paused/recalled the build to address before we roll any further. Thanks.

@Sean Squires That's great, thanks for the update, it felt like an issue with the latest patching for the navigation. And thanks for monitoring this thread too.

@Sean Squires -- pleasantly surprised tonight as I tested to see if the by some change the navigation fix made it to our tenant already.  Sure enough, it did, and................. it works perfectly!   Publishing enabled at the root site and navigation propogates perfectly to all subsites.  


That said, I needed to go into /_layouts/15/topnav.aspx and /_layouts/15/quiklnch.aspx on the top level and clear up some of the old links from when things were broken. 

 

Nice to have this working.... much better than running a powershell script to fix all sites/sub-sites..... thanks!

Great job @Sean Squires and MS team for monitoring this thread. Lots of good info.

I have set my tenant to first release. 

 

My issue: top nav in modern pages always opens in new tab. Does anyone see similar behavior? Can we set the top nav links to open in same window?

Thanks in advance

 

 

Looks like they fixed the weird numbers in the global navigation, but Im still seeing the page not found links in both the quick links and global navigation.  This should not show as it is a hidden page.

 

navigation.jpg

I've seen the same thing happen, but only for links to Contents and Subsites on the Site Contents page

I have one library in one subsite set-up as modern experience. It is showing all the correct navigation links in the top, global, navigation bar, yet they are not grouped into drop-down menus as per the rest of my site(s).

 

 

After trying to get with navigation consistent on modern pages here is what I concluded (as of 3/13 and subject to change in future):

 

1. Quick launch links for modern pages are setup at /_layouts/15/quiklnch.aspx. If publishing is turned on, _layouts/15/AreaNavigationSettings.aspx nav does not apply to modern pages. It applies only to classic pages.

 

2. Top nav for modern pages is setup at _layouts/15/topnav.aspx. For sub sites, top nav is inheritance settings are setup at _layouts/15/topnav.aspx

 

3. Top nav links on modern pages open in new window. But quick launch opens in same window.

 

 

 

The one problem I have run into is that links in global nav dropdowns (second level) just flat out don't work on modern document libraries. Click, nothing, click, nothing.......

 

@Sean Squires -- you're killin us!  So close..... :)

 

 

@Sean Squires I haven't seen this issue mentioned so far, so here goes. When creating a manual link in quick launch navigation to a view that is NOT the default view in a library works as expected in classic mode. But then in the library in modern mode the link is auto converted to the DEFAULT view for that library!

Agree.. Able to reproduce same behaviour

@kiran bellala wrote:

After trying to get with navigation consistent on modern pages here is what I concluded (as of 3/13 and subject to change in future):

 

1. Quick launch links for modern pages are setup at /_layouts/15/quiklnch.aspx. If publishing is turned on, _layouts/15/AreaNavigationSettings.aspx nav does not apply to modern pages. It applies only to classic pages.

 

2. Top nav for modern pages is setup at _layouts/15/topnav.aspx. For sub sites, top nav is inheritance settings are setup at _layouts/15/topnav.aspx

 

3. Top nav links on modern pages open in new window. But quick launch opens in same window.

 

 

 


Thats the problem we need the _layouts/15/AreaNavigationSettings.aspx to work on Modern Pages with publishing enabled.  Hopefully that is where they are going with all this.  So far everything in the navigation settings is working for me, except for the hidden pages are showing.  So its getting better than it was.

Thanks @kiran bellala - I missed your follow-up question. We are evaluating providing an affordance to specify the link opening behavior (yes, a departure from classic). Current design is links w/in same site path will open in same tab; links in a different path will open in a new tab. We're trying to minimize friction here, but can you elaborate on the business scenario to have more control over this behavior? Thanks!

@Marc Wenning - the page not found fix is rolling out - are you still seeing this issue?

@Phil Duffy - I haven't heard of this issue before and I'm unable to repro, so I wanted to verify configuration/steps:

1. I create a public view (not default) in document library

2. Copy that link and manually paste into quick launch (left) navigation on a modern (or classic?) page

3. Save my changes

 

Expected: I navigate to that specific library view

Actual: the link is taking me to the *default* library view

 

I'm getting the expected behavior in repro above, but let me know if I'm misinterpreting a step. Thanks.

Correct - this is the fix we are implementing - which we paused to address a regression we found and some other scenario-specific issues you all found. We have most of the fixes in and will be resuming the rollout of the fix (to support navigation on modern pages in classic team sites where publishing feature is enabled) later this week. Thanks for your patience!

OK, just did some more testing and here's what happens.

 

  1. I create a custom view for a library (in classic mode) and put a link to that view on the quick launch (/sites/training/phildemo/Upload%20Test/Forms/Custom.aspx)
  2. In classic mode when I click on the link, the view opens up as expected with different columns, etc
  3. The library is set to Modern mode so now my menu is in modern view, and if I now click on the same link the URL is still pointing to the custom view (/sites/training/phildemo/Upload%20Test/Forms/Custom.aspx) BUT what I see on refresh is actually the default view (All Documents)
  4. And then to make things stranger, I cannot select my custom view from the View drop down.
  5. If I then go to the site home (in classic mode) the link works as expected again

Hope that helps, happy testing!

 

Phil.

Most often we want to provide easier navigation to subsites using top nav or quick launch. This enables us to highlight few sub sites out of several sub sites. It totally makes sense to open a lik from different domain in new tab. But I think it is kind of annoying to users to open subsite in a new tabs because in user's mind they are still in "SharePoint".