Metadata Navigation with Variations enabled - Use Site collection term set or variation site term set?

Question

When using Metadata Navigation with Variations enabled, the default is the following (assuming languages EN-US and DE-DE):

• Site Collection (http://example.org/)
  • Site DE-DE (http://example.org/de-de)
  • Site EN-US (http://example.org/en-us)

Also the default for a publishing portal is to use the metadata navigation. SharePoint creates one term set per site (i.e. one navigation term set for the site collection, one for each new variation site).

So, right now I have three term sets:

• Site Navigation
• Variation Navigation
• Variation Navigation (EN-US)

By default the variation sites do not inherit the navigation from the site collection. That means if I create a new page within the source variation (de-de) and assign it a navigation metadata term, that term is automatically copied to the other's variation term set (so the term is copied from "Variation Navigation" to "Variation Navigation (EN-US)").

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Here comes my question: By doing so the "friendly URLs" are like so for the same page:

• http://example.org/de-de/freundlicheSeite
• http://example.org/en-en/friendlyPage

What I would like is to strip out the language part (de/en) and I would like the URL to be the following:

• http://example.org/freundlicheSeite
• http://example.org/friendlyPage

With the automatically generated term sets (per variation site) this doesn't seem possible, or is it? Would I have to inherit the navigation for all variation sites from the site collection and create the terms there manually - I mean I would lose all the "automatic copying of source variation to destination variation term set" functionality?

Answer 1

There isn't an "out-of-the-box" way to accomplish this. However, you could create your own custom Site Map Provider and in your code get the data from the Managed Metadata Service. Then you can modify the information however you need to.

Here is some info to get you started:

TaxonomySession (How you get the metadata): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.taxonomy.taxonomysession(v=office.14).aspx

Sample custom site map provider: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc789625(v=office.14).aspx