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Top link tab not properly highlighted when selected

I've been struggling with the top link tabs for a customers WSS 3.0 site for some time now. Some of the tabs would be highlighted properly when selected and some would not - reverting to highlighting the first tab in the list when selected.

Searching for a solution to this yielded nothing of value (this is as close as I got) so I set out to try and figure out the logic behind it all.

It turns out that the reason some of the tabs didn't highlight properly was twofold;

  • All links need to end with an actual web page. That is, you can not link to /sitename/listname/, you need to link to /sitename/listname/view.aspx.
  • The link can not contain any spaces - not even if you subsitute them with %20.

After changing the faulty links so that they complied with the above guidelines they all highlighted properly when selected.

If you find this post helpful, please link to it so that it climbs up the ranks in Google - I had a hell of a time finding anything relating to this when searching.

Published Sep 19 2007, 02:54 PM by MartinNr5
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Comments

 

Blogger Loser » Blog Archive » Top link tab not properly highlighted when selected said:

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September 19, 2007 8:39 AM
 

PolarSnail said:

but mos tabs in my sites are not actual pages,most of them saved in the datebase,in the MOSS webcontent libruary,how to solve these pages highlight effect when they are displaied?

September 20, 2007 6:46 AM
 

dink said:

We actually had a discussion on this going on SharePointU.com in mid August www.sharepointu.com/.../574.aspx

and I was able to come to the same conclusion about the spacing in the URL.  Also, this behaviour will occur when using absolute vs. relative URL's because it treats an absolute URL as an external page and therefore has no need to highlight the tab since in theory you'd be leaving the site.

- Dink

September 20, 2007 10:22 AM
 

ferretwoman said:

I had this problem in v2 when I was first setting it up and learned the same thing you did.  I luckily didn't have the spaces problem, but figuring out that the /default.aspx or whatever had to be there in order for it to work properly took me several frustrating days!

September 20, 2007 1:00 PM
 

Blogger Loser » Top link tab not properly highlighted when selected said:

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September 21, 2007 1:21 PM
 

MartinNr5 said:

@polarsnail: All the content in the database is accessed via a webpage of some sort and it is this webpage you link to.

@dink: I didn't find that discussion - hopefully your link to it here will help it climd the search engine ranks.

Good reasoning behind why it doesn't highlight the tabs in regards to absolute vs. relative URLs - it makes perfect sense.

September 26, 2007 2:23 AM
 

Orfeo said:

I found that for proper highlighting of the tabs, it is not necessary to add the filename like default.aspx to the link if the site is in the same sitecollection. When you type in the link, it won't highlight, but if you use the 'browse' button next to the link field, which presents the 'Select a link -- Web page dialog' and browse for any available site or page, that will result in proper highlighting.

I am ever so happy that I found this (by trial and error)

January 1, 2008 6:13 PM
 

Martin Edelius said:

Hi Orfeo!

Thanks for your feedback and glad you got it working properly. :)

January 2, 2008 12:54 PM
 

g33k said:

I just want to clarify this for some people.  I did find a long asp coding way to fix this issue.  However that is completely not needed.  Maybe my situation is not quite exactly the same.  So I will explain.  The relative pathing was the one clue that fixed this for me.  So anyways I usually copy the default.aspx once I get it set up how I like it so that I can create new pages and still have the quick lauch on the right and all my other web parts that I want on all the pages are already set up.  Then I rename the copy to the newname.aspx and create a link in the top nav to get to the page.  The problem was when I used mysitename/.../newname.aspx it would take me to the site but wouldn't highlight the tab in the nav bar.  This makes it confusing for the users to know what page they are on.  Since the newname.aspx is in the same location as the default.aspx the only thing you need to put in the link location box is the newname.aspx and the link will then be highlighted.  Hope this helps others out, I was searching for quite some time and didn't really want to go through all the new asp code that I read on another site.

July 22, 2008 12:06 PM
 

MartinNr5 said:

Hi g33k.

Thanks for your feedback - the more information we can add to this subject the better. :)

July 22, 2008 2:13 PM

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Posts (c) their respective authors. Everything else (c) 2007 SharePoint Experts