Customizing SharePoint Breadcrumb Navigation

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I need help trying to customize the Breadcrumb navigation displayed by SharePoint. I have created two .aspx pages in the Pages Library named search.aspx and products.aspx. A link from search.aspx leads to the page products.aspx, and I want the breadcrumb navigation to reflect this structure so that the breadcrumb looks as follows: Home > Search > Products

and where "Search" links to search.aspx.

However, when I navigate to the products.aspx page, the breadcrumb instead looks like: Home > Products.

I’d think this would be something easy to do within SharePoint by configuring the site navigation structure, but from my research on the Internet people suggested disabling SharePoint breadcrumbs and creating a custom web part that creates these links and simulates the functionality. If not, others recommend creating a custom sitemap provider. These seem to be a lot of work just to achieve the functionality I described.

Looking in the masterpage, there is a breadcrumb placeholder with the following content, with which my pages inherit from:

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Ben

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sharepointnavigationbreadcrumbs
Are you trying to use a breadcrumb more as a history/back-button? If so, I'm under the impression that's something of a code/design smell. Wikipedia says that "Some commentators criticize Path-style breadcrumbs because they duplicate functionality that properly subsists in the browser; namely, the 'Back' button and browsing history." – Richard JP Le Guen
... and that quote is cited to this article, which addresses quite nicely the difference between a breadcrumb and a "history trail." useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html – Richard JP Le Guen
Hi Richard. We are not trying to use the breadcrumb as a history/back-button, but more to outline the site structure or site taxonomy. I'm still new to SharePoint and I thought there might be a way of customizing what's seen in the breadcrumb just through configuration of the navigation structure. – Ben
I would also note that the back button is not desirable in some cases. If users are submitting form data (POST), then being redirected to the same page, the back button can potentially cause an undesired form resubmission, return to edit mode, etc. I would prefer breadcrumbs in this case, rather then relying on users to know how to go back X number of pages and differentiate between a page display and page edit mode. – josh-cain

1 Answers

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You can customize the asp:SiteMapPath control in the MasterPage, this other question has info on it