Initialize Page Titles from Site Map (Part 2)

Bryant Likes and Kent Boogaart offered great suggestions in response to a previous post on this subject. Their suggestion was to create an HttpModule to set page titles from a site map.

Kent also suggests this approach to add meta tags, such as keywords. This offers some interesting opportunities. You can give a <siteMapNode> element arbitrary attributes and have them picked up by your HttpModule.

For example, the following node has a keywords attribute:

<siteMapNode 
    url="page1.aspx" title="Test" description="This is a test" 
    keywords="Keywords go here" />

The sample HttpModule, I put together per Kent’s suggestion, looks for this attribute on SiteMap.CurrentNode and adds a meta tag in the page head. You can add any other meta information or links this way. The only limit here is imagination.

Big thanks to Scott Allen for inspiring these ideas through his recent article Master Pages: Tips, Tricks, and Traps.