Twitter Bootstrap - dropdowns inside navbar but outside nav-collapse

Question

I want to add a dropdown to the navbar, but ensure that when the browser is resized to a narrower width, the dropdown remains visible in the navbar and is not included in the nav-collapse.

The html below works. However, when the page resizes, the dropdown drops onto the next row, and displays expanded in the navbar, leaving me with a very deep navbar.

I'm calling bootstrap-collapse.js and bootstrap-dropdown.js.

Anyone got any ideas?

<div class="navbar navbar-fixed-top">
  <div class="navbar-inner">
    <div class="container">
      <a class="btn btn-navbar" data-toggle="collapse" data-target=".nav-collapse">
        <span class="icon-bar"></span>
        <span class="icon-bar"></span>
        <span class="icon-bar"></span>
      </a>
      <a class="brand" href="#">Project</a>
      <div class="nav-collapse">
        <ul class="nav">
          <li class="active"><a href="#">Home</a></li>
          <li><a href="#about">About</a></li>
          <li><a href="#contact">Contact</a></li>
        </ul>
      </div><!--/.nav-collapse -->
      <div class="container">
        <ul class="nav pull-right">
            <li class="divider-vertical"></li>
            <li class="dropdown">
                <a href="#" class="dropdown-toggle" data-toggle="dropdown">Sharing<b class="caret"></b></a>
                <ul class="dropdown-menu">
                    <li><a href="#">Twitter</a></li>
                    <li><a href="#">Facebook</a></li>
                    <li><a href="#">Google+</a></li>
                </ul>
            </li>
        </ul>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

Answer 1

According to Mark Otto, one of the bootstrap's developers:

All dropdowns within the .nav in the navbar will be affected. Currently we don't offer a way to prevent this behavior.

However, it is possible to have an uncollapsed dropdown in a collapsed navbar. You can accomplish this in one of three ways:

1. Add a data attribute to the dropdown (data-no-collapse="true") to fix the responsive selectors.
2. Replace the dropdown’s class (class="dropdown-menu-no-collapse") to rebuild its styles from the ground up.
3. Add another class to the dropdown (class="dropdown-menu no-collapse) to override the responsive styles.

I wrote a blog post that explains what to do. The first method requires editing bootstrap-responsive.css, and the second requires changing bootstrap.css. You don't have to change any of the bootstrap's CSS for the third method, but it's pretty hard to maintain.