Getting to know the area, group, and subarea properties

Let us look at the different properties of these components before we start customizing our Sales app navigation.

• The area component comprises of following properties:

• Group component shares most of the same properties as Area:

Subarea has few more properties compared to Area and Group:

• As we know that the site map is basically an XML file, any changes that we are doing through Site Map Designer are basically updating the site map's XML behind the scenes:
• To get the Sales App Site Map definition, export the solution containing the Sales App Site Map client extension and unzip it. Then, open the customizations.xml file and search for the SiteMap tag.
• The following is the sample XML for the My Work group of the Sales area inside the Sales App Site Map. We can see the Area, Group, and SubArea tags along with their corresponding attributes:

• As mentioned earlier, instead of using the Site Map Designer, we can manually update the site map's XML using any text editor, and can import back the solution (and publish it) to see the changes.

In this section, we looked at the properties of the area, group, and subarea components of Site Map Designer. In the next section, we will learn how to perform some basic operations such as updating, adding, deleting, and so on, on these components through Site Map Designer.