Have you recently come across a situation where after defining the links for your main navigation menu, it suddenly resets on its own showing every custom Web Page you’ve created? Well, in this post I am going to show you how to stop that from happening.
Behind the scenes
First, we need to understand how the menu is structured. A menu is represented by two entities in your CDS environment:
- Web Link Set: represents a group of links, the main menu for example is represented by the Default Web Link Set
- Web Link: represents the link to a certain page in your Portal, or an external URL, you can also define an image to be displayed and the order to be shown in your Web Link Set
For more information on managing Web Link Set/Web Link, please refer to the official documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/configure/manage-web-links.
Finally these entities are represented as custom Liquid objects, being rendered in the Header or Footer Web Template.
What is causing this menu reset?
Now let’s understand exactly what is happening with the Portals.
Microsoft is making a lot of investment in Portals Studio app (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/portal-designer-anatomy) adding lots of new features on a regular basis. Personally, I am not a big fan of the Portals Studio and I still go to the classic Portal Management app. If you are new to the Portals or just want to quickly update certain content, I completely agree that the Portals Studio interface is much easier and intuitive to make simple changes.
One important (and hidden) feature of the Portals Studio app, is that it automatically refreshes the Default Web Link Set with any custom Web Page you may have created. It doesn’t matter if you’ve created the Web Page via Portal Studio or Portal Management, this seems to happen on the onload event of the Portals Studio, but at the same time it doesn’t show you straight away, only after refreshing the Portals Studio page.
A bit confusing? Let’s try to replicate the issue step-by-step:
- Open two tabs in your browser, one with your Portals website and the other the Portal Studio App, at this moment the navigation menu should be identical in both tabs
- Create a new Web Page (can be a blank page), sync and refresh first just the Portals website
- Now your new Web Page is present in the menu
Now let’s go to the Portal Management App, navigate to the Web Link Set and open the Default Web Link Set. In the Web Links tab, you will see the recently created Web Page there as a new Web Link, even though you didn’t want it to be shown there.
Got it, now what’s the solution?
I know the above text was a bit long, but I think it is important to understand what’s happening in the background. There are a few ways to fix this.
Within the Portals Studio, you can hide the page from showing in the menu, what this will do is deactivate the Web Link record in the CDS, so it won’t show in the menu anymore. Just go to Pages, select the ellipses (…) on your page and click Hide in default menu:
But the problem is still there, if you create new pages it will keep adding to the menu. To get rid of this behavior, we need to change the reference to the Web Link Set. Let’s just forget about the Default Web Link Set and leave the Portals manage it the way it wants, we will be using the Primary Navigation Web Link Set for our menu. In the Portal Management App add/remove any links you want in your menu.
Once the menu has been defined in the Portal Management App, we need to set the Portals to use that Web Link Set, there are two ways of doing this. Please read the entire post before actually making any change in your environment:
Set Navigation Menu via Portals Studio
Open the Portals Studio and click on the main menu, and on the right-hand pane, change the navigation menu dropdown:
Click sync configuration and you’re done!
Set Navigation Menu via Portal Management App / Header Web Template
Go to the Web Templates, open the Header record. Simply change the reference to the Web Link Set, locate the line below, and replace Default for Primary Navigation:
Now clear the cache and don’t worry about this issue again.
Which method should I use?
One thing I noticed is that when changing the navigation menu via Portals Studio, the Portals automatically resets the Header Web Template with the OOB code, changing only the line mentioned above. If you haven’t made any customization in your Web Template, this won’t be an issue, and it is probably easier to change, but if you have made any changes in the Liquid code, you definitely don’t want to lose them, so you’re better off making the change manually in the Web Template.
Apparently this was a bug and it is now fixed in the version 9.2.5.x, although I currently find anywhere in the release notes, when testing this was now updating only the weblinkset assignment, instead of the entire Web Template
Update on 20th July 2020
I see a lot of people having issues with the menu navigation where the pages keep being added, I hope this post clarifies why this is happening and how to solve it.
Oliver Rodrigues 