WitwickiTech.com

Stumbled across an interesting situation today. A site admin asked how to turn on security trimming for the top navigation links on a SharePoint site. She had created several subsites and didn’t want the top nav tabs displayed if the user didn’t have access. She knew it could be done because she had been on other sites where it worked.

My first thought was “It just works, there is no ‘turn it on’ option”. So I went to the site to take a look. Sure enough, two of the four tabs displayed even if the user didn’t have access to those subsites. So I did some investigating and it turns out that when manually creating top navigation headings (using the Publishing feature navigation screen), if you use the full URL to the subsite, security trimming does not occur while if you use the relative URL to the subsite, security trimming does work. That’s rather interesting behaviour and it makes me wonder what other effects can happen when using full URLs vs relative URLs.

For Reference, the server environment is SharePoint 2007 Enterprise (MOSS) on Windows 2003 and SQL Server 2005 with SP2 and the August 2009 CU. The client environment is Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP with Office 2007.