Navigation
To ensure a consistent way for users to
find and interact with apps, SharePoint 2013 provides two standardized
navigational elements:
- Quick Launch navigation (see Figure 11)
- All Site Content tiles (see Figure 12)
App developers have little control over the style
and location of the Quick Launch navigation because it is provided by
SharePoint and the inclusion of your app in this navigation is dictated
by the user. However, app developers have more control over the
appearance of their application’s tiles available in the Site Contents
section of a SharePoint 2013 site. You are able to specify the name and
tile icons shown.
As a developer you can specify the following properties via the AppManifest.xml file in your application:
- Name
- Title (shown in the SharePoint site UI)
- Tile icon (96 × 96 PNG)
Try out the following exercise to learn how to change the look of your application with a custom tile and name.
Customizing Your Application’s Name and Tile
In this exercise you set a new tile
image for your application. You must have completed the “Building Your
First SharePoint Application” in the “App Parts and Pages” section
before starting this example.
1. Ensure you have the MyFirstSharePointApp solution open in Visual Studio 2012.
2. Locate and double-click the AppManifest.xml file in the MyFirstSharePointApp project to open it in Design view.
3. Change the title of the application to My First SharePoint Application.
4. Click Browse next to the Icon path text box.
5. Press F5 to package and deploy your application.
6. After the app deploys, you should see its new title and icon displayed (see Figure 13).
How It Works
In this exercise you customized the
title and icon for your application. A SharePoint application’s
configuration properties are stored in the AppMenifest.xml
file. Visual Studio 2012 provides a designer-based interface over this
file so you can configure these properties easily; however, you can
also go into the XML itself to set them.
