Edwin Vriethoff

SharePoint federated search may cause performance problems because of default settings

Edwin Vriethoff — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:16:45 +0000

My colleague Vincent Boer has been working very hard at one of our clients to sort out a performance problem at their SharePoint Intranet portal.

The problem was that after a search in the search center was performed, the browser would not navigate any further for 1 or 2 minutes. Finally this blog of Sourav provided the right solution.

Since the Infrastructure update, search has been extended with Federated search. The default setting for the federated search results, is to query the online OpenSearch for results. This is fine as long as the web server has internet access, but if internet access is restricted, performance problems will occur in the SharePoint environment. The solution is to alter the configuration and set Federated Search to use the local Index. Basically you’ll have to decide if you would like to use OpenSearch and enable internet access for the server, or keep it locked and use the classic index.

Somehow Microsoft did not include any clear instructions with the Infrastructure update about this new default setting and possible implications for non internet enabled servers. If your Search center is experiencing performance issues, check out Sourav’s blog posting for a possible solution and detailed steps to solve it.

ContentQuery Web Part xsl script to view all available values

Edwin Vriethoff — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:58:50 +0000

I’m often using the following xsl template script to check the available values and items which are available for the Content Query Web Part.

This script can be added to the itemstyle.xsl for use. I’m always copying it from older projects, so now it’s on my blog for faster access

ITEM:

VALUE:

SharePoint SP2 activates 180 day trial countdown

Edwin Vriethoff — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:21:47 +0000

The Microsoft SharePoint Team announced that the SharePoint SP2 service pack by mistake activates a 180-day countdown.

“During the installation of SP2, a product expiration date is improperly activated. This means SharePoint will expire as though it was a trial installation 180 days after SP2 is deployed. The activation of the expiration date will not affect the normal function of SharePoint up until the expiration date passes. Furthermore, product expiration 180 days after SP2 installation will not affect customer’s data, configuration or application code but will render SharePoint inaccessible for end-users.”

The team is working as hard as possible to release a hotfix to address the issue.

The Work around is also known: Re-enter the Product ID numbers on the Convert License Type page in Central Administration.

More information at the Microsoft SharePoint team site.

Enable item scheduling by code

Edwin Vriethoff — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:29:48 +0000

I’m developing a site template, which requires item scheduling on the page library. I don’t want our users to enable the item scheduling manually at the “_layouts/ ManageItemScheduling.aspx” page. Unfortunately I was not able to find any online documentation about how to do this with code.

It required me to dig deeper and .Net reflector turned out to be the right way to go. Microsoft made a lot of the required functions internal, which means that we cannot access the functions from our own code. By analyzing the steps I was able to add item scheduling on the pages library with the code below.

Step 1: Enable Moderation and Minor versions
To allow item scheduling, we must enable moderation and minor versions on the pages list.

SPWeb web = new SPSite(”http://web”).OpenWeb();
SPList list = web.Lists["Pages"];

//Enable moderation and minor versions
list.EnableModeration = true;
list.EnableMinorVersions = true;
list.Update();

Step 2: Register Scheduling Events
The item scheduling requires us to register 2 events.
First we will retrieve the assembly and class information of the ScheduledItemEventReceiver and then we will create the 2 events.

//get type information
Type scheduledItemType = typeof(Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.ScheduledItemEventReceiver);
string assemblyName = scheduledItemType.Assembly.FullName.ToString();
string className = scheduledItemType.FullName;

//Get the eventreceivers
SPEventReceiverDefinitionCollection eventReceivers = list.EventReceivers;

//Register the updating event
SPEventReceiverDefinition updateDef = eventReceivers.Add();
updateDef.Name = “Item Updating Event Handler For Scheduling”;
updateDef.Type = SPEventReceiverType.ItemUpdating;
updateDef.Assembly = assemblyName;
updateDef.Class = className;
updateDef.Update();

//Register the added event
SPEventReceiverDefinition addDef = eventReceivers.Add();
addDef.Name = “Item Added Event Handler For Scheduling”;
addDef.Type = SPEventReceiverType.ItemAdded;
addDef.Assembly = assemblyName;
addDef.Class = className;
addDef.Update();

Step 3: Unhide the startdate and expirydate fields
The list already contains the startdate and expirydate fields, but they are hidden. With the following code we will unhide the fields.

//Get the field guids of the startdate and expirydate
Guid startDateGuid = Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.FieldId.StartDate;
Guid expiryDateGuid = Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.FieldId.ExpiryDate;

//update the visibility of the startdate
SPField startDateField = list.Fields[startDateGuid];
startDateField.Hidden = false;
startDateField.Update();

//update the visibility of the expirydate
SPField expiryDateField = list.Fields[expiryDateGuid];
expiryDateField.Hidden = false;
expiryDateField.Update();

And that’s it. With these coding steps we enabled item scheduling at the Page library.

Twitter!

Edwin Vriethoff — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:10:31 +0000

After a long time I finally decided to join the twitter hype. Or perhaps isn’t it a hype anymore?

Regularly I found myself searching for a way to share or track small information. The problem is that it’s often too small to create a complete blog posting for.

Twitter seems to be a great tool to track or share small information, so today I finally made my first steps in the Twitter world at http://www.twitter.com/edwindotnet.