Electrum on SharePoint

Levels of SharePoint development

2009-10-08T11:46:00.002+01:00

We've got more than a few SharePoint projects under our belt at Electrum now, looking back we've used many different techniques and levels of integration. On some projects we've been able to meet our client's requirements with "out-of-the-box" features, for others we've had to get our hands dirty with SharePoint internals.

Reviewing all our projects we're able to spot a spectrum of options, from OOTB to fully bespoke:

Just use the Web UI and built in Web Parts, List templates, Site Templates, and Workflows
Use SharePoint Designer – Custom forms, workflows, DataViews (XSLT manipulation of List XML), JavaScript.
Enable inline .Net code in Web.config - this can be enough to tweak a bit of logic on a page, or add validation.
Develop components in Visual Studio.Net (can be specific to one site, or re-usable across sites). Parameterized Workflows, Web-Parts, custom actions and conditions for SPD workflows, Content types (with custom pages, and code)
Develop whole sites in VS.Net

SharePoint search broken

2009-09-08T10:22:00.000+01:00

If you find that your search no longer returns any results in SharePoint, and you notice some errors in the event log, such as:

"Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has "Full Read" permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled. (0x80041205)."

then the following page contains a registry fix that has sorted the problem for us!

http://stabilissolutions.blogspot.com/2009/02/sharepoint-2007-search-access-denied.html

Disable the loopback check

Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.
Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.
In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.

Forensic SharePoint Delvelopment

2009-08-03T15:32:00.001+01:00

Sometimes you know how to do something through the SP web UI, but can't find the methods or properties in the API. Let's admit it, the SharePoint API documents on MSDN are sometimes a little lacking.

This is when "forensic" SharePoint development can come to your aid.

Look at the URL of the UI page in your browser to get the page name.
Find the aspx page in the Templates folder of the 12 hive
Open the page in your favourite text editor, and find out its the code-behind class, normally this will be in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Application namespace, which lives in an assembly with the same name in your site's bin directory.
Download redgate's .NET Reflector http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/
Open the assembly in reflector, find the class, and decompile the code
You can now see how SP does its thing.

CAML Builder

2009-07-24T11:37:00.001+01:00

We've used this for a while now and it saves a lot of time when creating CAML queries.

http://www.u2u.be/Res/Tools/CamlQueryBuilder.aspx

Hide New / Actions / Upload / Settings menus in SharePoint Lists / document libraries

2009-06-14T14:24:00.001+01:00

One possible way to hide the New / Actions / Upload / Settings menus in SharePoint is to register a custom action, and set the ControlClass element to a control that inherits from WebControl. In the WebControl, you can override OnPreRender, which then does this (for example):

Id="DocumentLibrary.ViewToolbar"
Location="ViewToolbar"
RegistrationType="ContentType"
RegistrationId="0x01"
ControlAssembly="My.Assembly.Name, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=9sd9ds9ds9sd9ds"
ControlClass="My.Assembly.Name.MyClassName"
/>

public class MyClassName: WebControl
{
protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)
{
if (SPContext.Current.List != null)
{

foreach (Control control in this.Parent.Controls)
{
switch (control.ToString())
{
case "Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.NewMenu":
case "Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.UploadMenu":
case "Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.ActionsMenu":
case "Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.SettingsMenu":
control.Visible = false;
break;
}
}

}
}

Alternative to iisreset on deployment

2009-05-15T10:21:00.001+01:00

Rather than wait till after business hours (if that's even possible) to do an iisreset, you can just recycle the Application Pool instead.

cscript c:\windows\system32\iisapp.vbs /a "[NameOfAppPool]" /r

Central Administration Regional Settings

2008-10-31T16:06:00.002Z

There is no link to the Regional Settings page in WSS 3.0 Central Administration, however the functionality is there if you navigate to .../_layouts/regionalsetng.aspx.

Discovering farm incoming email settings using the SharePoint API

2008-09-23T14:20:00.002+01:00

The farm incoming email settings, that can be viewed and changed in SharePoint central administration, can be discovered using the SharePoint API using the following technique (for example):

SPIncomingEmailService emailService = (SPIncomingEmailService)SPFarm.Local.Farm.GetChild();

And the server email display address can be found like this:

emailService.ServerDisplayAddress

Debugging EmailReceived list event

2008-09-19T10:48:00.002+01:00

I encountered an issue when trying to debug the EmailReceived event for an email enabled list (document library) in SharePoint. Note: To debug the EmailReceived event handler you need to debug the OWSTIMER service, not W3WP.

I deployed the feature using Visual Studio (SharePoint Extensions) and debugging worked fine. However, when I then updated the code, and redeployed, next time I came to debug it was still running the old version of the EmailReceived event handler.

It turns out that the OWSTIMER service needs to be restarted if any updates are made to the EmailReceived event handler code in order for the changes to come into effect!

Credit to this post for the answer:
http://dkeeling.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1FF0B17B869C973!159.entry

More to follow hopefully on creating an EmailReceived event handler for a custom list definition (you can't enable email for a list based on a custom list definition out the box, you need to create the event handler yourself).

QuickLaunch navigation query string issues in WSS

2008-08-29T15:54:00.002+01:00

If you want to add a new navigation node to the quick launch, and you want the url for that node to include query string parameters then you *must* set the IsExternal property of the SPNavigation node to true. If you don't do this, then the query string portion of the url is removed automatically.

Unfortunately, setting IsExternal to true means that:

1) Url fix up (based on MSDN documentation) is not performed (since IsExternal is true)

2) Security trimming is not applied to the url since it is specified as external. If the user does not have access to the url, then they receive an “Access Denied” screen when they click on the link instead of not seeing the link at all.

Credit to the post by Pete Skelly here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.navigation.spnavigationnode.properties.aspx

Note, if you are using MOSS then the following might help you:
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/koning53/archive/2007/11/26/adding-querystring-parameters-to-a-spnavigationnode.aspx

Useful page for making new columns

2008-08-26T14:19:00.002+01:00

This page is great when you're making up new content types and columns for use in Workflows.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms437580.aspx

Getting the item which a workflow task relates to

2008-08-26T10:08:00.005+01:00

I had a task edit page in my workflow where I needed to get some values from the item on which I had originally run the workflow initially. To get this object out, you can do the following

object associatedWorkflowListId = workflowTaskListItem ["ows_WorkflowListId"];
object associatedWorkflowItemId = workflowTaskListItem ["ows_WorkflowItemId"];

if (associatedWorkflowItemId != null && associatedWorkflowListId != null)
{
SPListItem associatedItem = web.Lists.GetList(new Guid(associatedWorkflowListId .ToString()), false).GetItemById(int.Parse(associatedWorkflowItemId .ToString()));
}

Web Part Maintenance Page

2008-08-01T10:00:00.003+01:00

I had an issue where I was trying to open an aspx file inside SP Designer but it refused. There wasn't anything in the page itself that should have caused this.

It said in the response to check the Web Part Maintenance Page and in order to find this, there is a shortcut from any page on a SharePoint site.

Simply add "contents=1" in the querystring and it will come up. Turns out I had a bunch of webparts which had failed in the past and these were blocking Designer. Removing them worked.

Filtering by querystring in a document library (or list)

2008-07-16T07:12:00.004+01:00

If you need to filter a document library or list to show only list items which match a certain criteria specified in the querystring, add 1 or more attributes to your querystring which look like the following:

Forms/AllItems.aspx?FilterField1=CompanyName&FilterValue1=Electrum

Note, your field name needs to be the internal name which Sharepoint stores. You can find what this is exactly by editing the field in the Document Library settings and checking what it says in the querystring.

SPQuery returning all items in a list?

2008-07-15T11:00:00.003+01:00

If you're using SPQuery to get out certain elements of a list/document library, starting the .query property with a tag will give you back everything regardless of what your where clause is. Make sure your .query property starts with and it should work then

"Failure decompressing data from a cabinet file" when saving site as a template

2008-07-01T16:00:00.002+01:00

If you try saving a site as a template through the SharePoint UI, you might see the error

Failure decompressing data from a cabinet file
You can get round this by using the stsadm tool.

To export,

stsadm.exe -o export -url http://yoursite/test -includeusersecurity -nofilecompression -filename c:\backup.bak

To import,

stsadm.exe -o import -url http://yoursite/test2 -includeusersecurity -nofilecompression -filename c:\backup.bak

Error on starting Sharepoint Search service

2008-06-27T15:08:00.004+01:00

When you try starting the Sharepoint search service through the Central Administration section, you might get an error which says

SPSearch ()

Highly useful error message as always! Typically the cause of this is that you've put in a username in the previous page but not qualified it by giving the domain also. Go back and put in the domain of the server then the username and your service should start ok then.

HttpHandler on Document Library documents

2008-06-27T14:04:00.003+01:00

If you need to intercept a document on the way to the user, create an HttpHandler for the file types you are interested in (.doc and .pdf in our case). Our handler takes the user off to a new aspx page which gives more information about the document in question.

We found that in Firefox, this worked fine, the user was always taken to the new page whether they click on a PDF or a doc. In Internet Explorer however, the page would appear when clicking on the PDF but for the Word doc, the page would only appear if the user right-clicked and chose open / open in new tab / open in new window. Left-clicking on the Word doc gave a prompt like the following asking if you were sure you wanted to open it.

"Some files can harm your computer. If the file information looks suspicious or you do not fully trust the source, do not open the file.
You are opening the following file:"

Clicking OK to this prompt opened up Word and inside was the contents of the aspx page which you should have seen in the browser.

Turns out there is some client integration javascript in the onclick event of the filename in Sharepoint and so you need to override this (how to override functions in core.js) so that it tries to load the document in a normal fashion instead.

Hide the "Send To" option for documents

2008-06-27T13:55:00.009+01:00

If you want to hide any DHTML menus which appear within Sharepoint, you'll notice that they are usually found in core.js. Obviously you don't want to start tampering with core.js since you're affecting every Sharepoint instance and so we need to override the function by declaring a local one instead.

To hide the "Send To" menu, make a script section in your masterpage and insert the same function name and params as in core.js but delete the contents.

e.g.

function AddSendSubMenu(m,ctx) { }

There's one more step though before this will work and that is to change the way the core.js script is loaded. In your master page, you'll notice the line

<sharepoint:scriptlink language="javascript" name="core.js" defer="True" runat="server">

The defer attribute means that it is loaded last and so your new declaration is overridden by the core.js one. Simply change the defer="true" to defer="false" or remove the defer attribute altogether.

Events stop working after BinaryWrite?

2008-06-25T08:53:00.004+01:00

After doing a Response.BinaryWrite() then Response.End(), all events on my page stopped working meaning that if I cancelled the download and then clicked again on the download link, nothing happened.

Found the answer courtesy of Andy Spears from here

1) Set your button's client-side click event to: "exportRequested=true;"
2) register the following JS:

string beforeSubmitJS = "\nvar exportRequested = false; \n";
beforeSubmitJS += "var beforeFormSubmitFunction = theForm.onsubmit;\n";
beforeSubmitJS += "theForm.onsubmit = function(){ \n";
beforeSubmitJS += "var returnVal = beforeFormSubmitFunction(); \n";
beforeSubmitJS += "if(exportRequested && returnVal) {_spFormOnSubmitCalled=false; exportRequested=false;} \n";
beforeSubmitJS += "return returnVal; \n";
beforeSubmitJS += "}; \n";
this.Page.ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript(this.GetType(), "alterFormSubmitEvent", beforeSubmitJS, true);

Getting an SPUser from an SPList

2008-06-24T13:22:00.004+01:00

If you need to get out an SPUser from a list in code-behind, you can do the following

SPUser test = GetSPUser(oListItem, oList.Fields.GetField("Your Person Fieldname"));

private SPUser GetSPUser(SPListItem item, SPField field)
{
string currentValue = item[field.Title].ToString();
SPFieldUser userField = (SPFieldUser)field;
SPFieldUserValue fieldValue = (SPFieldUserValue)userField.GetFieldValue(currentValue);
return fieldValue.User;
}

(adapted from http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3118673&SiteID=1)

Service Unavailable

2008-06-24T11:39:00.005+01:00

Occasionally a deployment from VS 2005 or through the setup.bat will leave the your Sharepoint server in a state such that when you browse to the site, the message "Service Unavailable" is shown.

Check the Application Pools in IIS and make sure that the Application Pool used for the application you are trying to access is started.

The template you have chosen is invalid or cannot be found

2008-06-12T09:26:00.006+01:00

If you are experiencing a "The template you have chosen is invalid or cannot be found" error when trying to create a site from a site definition, for example, then the first thing to check is that you have used a unique ID in the webtemp*.xml file. The value in Bold is the value in question:

...
<Template Name="My Custom Site Definition" ID="10000">
...

Changing the value in bold above to something unique fixes the problem:

...
<Template Name="My Custom Site Definition" ID="10100">
...

Displaying choices for a Sharepoint field in a dropdown

2008-06-11T09:04:00.003+01:00

If you need to display all the possible options for a choice field in a dropdown but can't use the bind the Sharepoint control with ControlMode, you can get the list of choices using the SPFieldChoice object and populate it yourself. In the example below, oList is an instance of an SPList which I've retrieved by executing as an elevated user since the user using this form does not have access to the list.

SPField oField = oList.Fields["Country"];
SPFieldChoice oFieldChoices = (SPFieldChoices)oField;

// iterate over each choice
foreach (string choice in oFieldChoices.Choices)
{
countryDropDown.Items.Add(new ListItem(choice, choice));
}

Setting Hyperlink Column Text from Workflows

2008-06-10T08:22:00.002+01:00

SharePoint provides a nice little editor which lets you set both the link (url) and the description text for hyperlink columns:
But it's not obvious how you set both of these from a SharePoint Designer (SPD) workflow.

Both the url and description are actually stored together as a single string, separated by a comma. So to set both, use the Build Dynamic String action to construct something like "http://www.electrum.co.uk/, Electrum Rock!" and then use it to set the list item's hyperlink column value.