When customizing SharePoint master pages you’ll notice pretty quickly is the application tries to think for you. Well actually, not really think for you, but there’s a lot going on under the covers you need to account for.
Recently I added a custom sitemap provider to a set of master pages. Regardless of where you are in the application (across sites, the My Site host, search center… anywhere) I wanted to display the same global navigation. In my custom master pages, I ripped out the default global navigation controls and added in my own sitemap provider.
The provider is actually pretty cool, follow up post soon to come where I’ll describe how I did it. It basically sits in place of where the default nav provider sat but with managed links and rollover drop down menus:
THE PROBLEM
However, once I added the custom provider I noticed modal popup windows also have this custom provider. This doesn’t make sense, I don’t want to see any of these customizations in modal popups. I’ve also seen this before when customizing the position of breadcrumbs in 2010 and other custom header elements:
THE SOLUTION
The fix for this is pretty easy, in fact it’s pretty useful. I when back and looked a the out of the box corev4.css style sheet. After looking through hundreds of lines of messy and redundant styles I discovered a class used by some of the out of the box header elements I wasn’t using called s4-notdlg.
The thing that was interesting about this style to me was that a majority of the out of the box master page top level div elements used this style. It essentially defines certain elements as not displayed in the modal popup windows. I also ran into this issue recently on another design project with a custom persistent footer. All you need to do to hide custom elements from the popup windows, add the s4-notdlg class to your custom element div:
<div class=”custom-element-class s4-notdlg”> … </div>Notice once I’ve added this helpful class to my custom element div, the element is hidden from the modal window:
