Extending the 50-site limit in SharePoint's Site Directory

Today while at work I was working to clean up our intranet’s site directory in SharePoint. I noticed that the Site Map (a Table of Contents web part) was only listing 50 sites. Since I knew there were more and that this was probably the result of some inherent limit to the web part, I dug around and found this post (no longer working) which explains how to modify your web.config.

It basically boils down to adding a property DynamicChildLimit=”XX” to the following entries in the siteMap providers section of the web.config file, where XX is 0 (no limit) or whatever numeric limit you decide. By default it is – you guessed it – 50.

(The web.config file to modify is usually located in C:InetpubwwwrootwssVirtualDirectories80, with the last portion being whatever port number MOSS is running from):
<siteMap ...>
<providers>
<add name="GlobalNavSiteMapProvider" description="CMS provider for Global navigation" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Global" EncodeOutput="true" DynamicChildLimit="0" />
<add name="CombinedNavSiteMapProvider" description="CMS provider for Combined navigation" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Combined" EncodeOutput="true" DynamicChildLimit="0" />
<add name="CurrentNavSiteMapProvider" description="CMS provider for Current navigation" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Current" EncodeOutput="true" DynamicChildLimit="0" />
<add name="CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode" description="CMS provider for Current navigation, no encoding of output" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Current" EncodeOutput="false" DynamicChildLimit="0" />
</providers>
</siteMap>

4 thoughts on “Extending the 50-site limit in SharePoint's Site Directory”

    1. I would think that Microsoft would have to provide some insight there… I do not know if this works or is possible with SharePoint 2013 online.

    1. Depending on your architecture, it may not be necessary for the change to be made on WFE and App servers, but if it were me, I would include the App servers just to cover all bases.

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