Partial page load across site collections (Modern team sites

[raymondlittle100]

Category

• Question
• Typo
• Bug
• Additional article idea

Expected or Desired Behavior

When moving between site collections the page context is refreshed and application customizers are re-loaded with new site details. This used to be the behavior until a couple of weeks ago.

Observed Behavior

Until recently this worked as expected but now when you navigate between pages in different site collections you get a partial page load and any application customizers are not re-loaded.

Steps to Reproduce

Below shows a page with an application customizer which passes the current site from the context to a react component. On first load the current site is correct but after clicking a link to a different team site the page is partially refreshed and the application customizer is not re-loaded. This may be by design but it not how this used to work until a couple of weeks ago and I can find nothing from MS describing this change

Original page load

Component details after clicking link

[tdwhite0]

What you need to do is hook into the navigatedEvent of the app customizer. You can do this in the onInit.
this.context.application.navigatedEvent.add(this, () => { // update your control })

Another thing I have found is that if you use the url of the page you are on from the browser window.location to make any calls inside webparts you will find that the partial navigation causes their js to run before the url is actually updated. So you should always pass the context around and never read from window.location.

[raymondlittle100]

You can use this but the documentation from Microsoft still suggests you use the changedEvent, see documentation below.

This approach worked fine until Microsoft changed the partial page loading to work across site collections whereas previous it was only within the one site collection. All I'm trying to do, and have been for the last few weeks, is get a clear position from them around what is the expected behavior. Its frustrating because all they have to do is say yes its expected or its not. If it is expected here is the correct approach for registering your customizer but there has been nothing

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/spfx/extensions/get-started/using-page-placeholder-with-extensions

[tdwhite0]

@raymondlittle100 I agree the partial navigation feature is broken. I am trying to debug issues with it right now in fact. I have the issue where when the page does the partial navigation to a page on a different site collection, it seems to reload components two or more times and causes all their async logic to run multiple times.

[raymondlittle100]

@tdwhite0 Thanks for the response good to know its not just me. When i was testing using the changedEvent customizer event my React render methods weren't event getting hit so it was as if the customizer wasn't getting re-loaded.

Slightly disappointed on the lack of response on this one

[tdwhite0]

@VesaJuvonen did a recent update for this go out that enabled partial navigation between site collections recently? I recently started experiencing some weird issues and that might explain it.

[raymondlittle100]

@tdwhite0 there was a recent change to the customizer events for things like navigating to search application pages and back to ensure the customizer was reloaded but that was a month or two ago. This seemed to start a few weeks ago and I can't find anything to say if its expected or not hence this bug.

[tdwhite0]

@raymondlittle100 We also had something that seems related: We rendered a tags with target="_blank" to get them to open in new tabs, which just recently broke because SP started taking them over and doing partial navigation.

[RichG82]

@tdwhite0 Thanks for the workaround. I am experiencing the same thing with regard to window.location. It seems that there is a lot of unexpected behavior when doing a partial navigation even through normal HTML links (missing title sometimes, tooltips text breaking)

@raymondlittle100 same here. App customizers not running again on a partial page navigation is happening for me too.

I wish we could get a little more traction on this issue.

[raymondlittle100]

@tdwhite0 if you're tags are links you can disable the partial page rendering by adding data-interception="off".

My guess is MS had some code which looks for all links ending with .aspx which used to look for only links pointing to the current site collection and when once of these were hit only reload the content area. This seems to be have been expanded so its not only links in the same team site but any team site.

[tdwhite0]

I started a new issue for my specific case: #2023

[raymondlittle100]

Anything on this?

[rmillener]

@raymondlittle100 thanks for the data-interception="off" tip. Our solution was much more convoluted.

Ours is working in Chrome with a this.context.application.navigatedEvent callback but has stopped working in IE11. In IE the customiser (I assume correctly??) disposes and disappears from the page.

This has been absolutely catastrophic for our deployment. I'm surprised this isn't getting more attention.

[raymondlittle100]

@VesaJuvonen any ideas on this?

[marcDeSantis]

I am also having this same issue, and glad to know I'm not crazy. We are seeing this with a topbar navigation menu built using AngularJS. As you navigate between site collections, it will often throw the browser back to the originating site collection when navigating through secondary collections.

We just released our intranet on May 30th, and it was working fine up until about 2 weeks ago.

I opened a Premier Support ticket, and they are investigating. Has anybody else done so?

[marcDeSantis]

@raymondlittle100 can you explain the data-interception tag? Does that just get added as an attribute of the anchor tag?

@tdwhite0 do you have an example of how to get the window location from the context?