How to: Hide the Actions Menu in SharePoint

Introduction

The article shows you have to hide or show the "Actions Menu" depending on the permissions of the current user; i.e., how to security trim your SharePoint pages. You do this by using the Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl.

Background

I had to give my read-only users the site-level permission "Edit Personal User Information". However, giving them this permission turned on the "Site Actions" menu displaying the "View all site content" menu item. To resolve thism I wrapped the PublishingSiteAction:SiteActionMenu control in a Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl.

Using the Code

SharePoint comes with a control for security trimming your pages, called Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl. You can use this to hide certain elements and show certain elements depending on the permissions of the current user.

You use the control by:

1. wrapping the control to be security trimmed with the Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl.
2. specifying what permissions a user can have in the Permissions property of the Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl.

<Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat="server" 
      Permissions="ManagePermissions,ViewPages,BrowseUserInfo,Open,EditMyUserInfo">
 <PublishingSiteAction:SiteActionMenu runat="server"/>
</SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>

You can see the possible values that can be assigned to the Permissions property here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spbasepermissions.aspx. For more info on the SPSecurityTrimmedControl class, visit this page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.webcontrols.spsecuritytrimmedcontrol.aspx.