Sharepoint Nirvana

Sharepoint 2010 Sneak Peeks

JamieMcAllister — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:24:00 -0400

The Sharepoint 2010 Teasers are available. I do like the sound of some of them! Time to brush up on your Silverlight as it will become very useful in Sharepoint 2010.

Check out the summary and videos:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/Overview-Video.aspx

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/Developer-Video.aspx

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/IT-Pro-Video.aspx

Typical Integration Issues

JamieMcAllister — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 10:31:00 -0400

I'm currently working on a public MOSS Publishing site. As is normal on such projects, code is being cut on Virtual Machines on the developer PCs, and later placed in an integration environment to make sure it works. A couple of errors arose recently during the integration of web parts which I think are worthy of note.

First, a web part is added to a page layout. The page refuses to render with the error "Compiler Error CS0117 'Type' does not contain a definition for 'Identifier' ". This was most confusing as it works fine on the dev machine and well frankly the error message doesn't give a good hint. Eventually I googled this; http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c4aad8at(vs.80).aspx

In the mad rush to develop the web parts, the developer had kept the default namespace and class name in the project. These were the same, and that was causing this error in Integration (but not dev). Following the good practise of changing the namspaces to a standard one for the functional area (and no longer being the same as the class name) fixed this issue.

Second issue of note. One web part renders a Link button. As you probably know this uses javascript to action the postback. Clicking on the Link button in Integration gives the javascript error message "'null' is null or not an object". I didn't find any specific article that nailed this one, but I saw enough to give me a hunch it was a validation control issue. For some reason, the required field validator rendered by another web part on the page seemed to cause this error. Removing that validator fixed the issue. Luckily the validator was overkill and could be removed. In the mad rush of projects we didn't check all the options. It could be that turning off the validators client side javascript property would've done it, but hey what can I do? Our release date looms large! ;)

Service with a Smile

JamieMcAllister — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:46:00 -0400

A representative of Microsoft contacted me recently to discuss some of the Variations bugs I've described in this blog. In a nice proactive way they seem to be looking at the errors described online and trying to reproduce them, with a view to a fix.

With my customer hat on I have to say I'm quite pleased with such behaviour. Sharepoint is an important product that deserves to be the best it can be. This sort of action by Microsoft is a positive move to achieving that.

The two issues we discussed were Variations breaking when a site url is renamed, and where deleting a variation label trashes the Relationships List. I no longer work for the company who experienced the url rename issue, but I was able to broker an introduction between them and the Microsoft rep. The Variation Label issue was reproduced after a round of email between Redmond and I.

All in all quite satisfying. Now they know I'm not making these bugs up! ;)

Sharepoint SP2 a boon to Variations

JamieMcAllister — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:41:00 -0400

Noticed today that details of Sharepoint SP2 have been posted on the Office Sustained Engineering blog. It's particularly interesting to me that the ECM improvements in the service pack are mostly targetted at variations.

Here's an extract of what it says;

"The performance and stability of content deployment and variations feature has been improved.

A new tool has been added to the STSADM command-line utility that enables a SharePoint administrator to scan sites that use the variations feature for errors."

Glad to see they're not giving up on Variations. Very curious to see what they ultimately do with them in Sharepoint 2010.

Sharepoint Space Monitor

JamieMcAllister — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 12:54:00 -0400

How can you monitor the disk space usage in your site collection? Just how much space is that subsite taking up?

Up until now the only suggestion might have been to use the _layouts/storman.aspx page. This was unsatisfactory however because it required Site Quotas to be set, and didn't report size by site. If those compromises didn't work for you, then custom coding was your next option.

That's not required anymore! Tim Dobrinski has been coding his cotton socks off again to produce another free tool for the Sharepoint community. His Sharepoint Space Monitor should nail the Sharepoint Site size reporting issue once and for all.

As I say, the tool is free, and can be found via this link; http://www.thesug.org/blogs/lsuslinky/SSM/Pages/default.aspx

Content Type Limits in MOSS

JamieMcAllister — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:16:00 -0400

Someone asked me an interesting question recently;

“Is there a limit on the number of content types that one can add to a list or library ?”

This isn’t something I’d ever seen documented, so I started looking for the answer. Eventually, I found some comments about a post by Martin Kearn at this page; http://blogs.msdn.com/martinkearn/archive/2006/03/27/561809.aspx

His comment answered basically the same question, and he stated “there is no hard limit in terms of the number you can have. The only hard limit in the product is that the total size of all content type schema on the list cannot exceed 2GB”.

I was glad to finally have some sort of answer, but two things worried me;
1. I don’t like taking such answers at face value without verifying the facts myself
2. His comment addressed MOSS 2007 beta 2, rather than the current released version

So, how to verify this myself? I didn’t fancy creating 2Gb of Content Type Schema to load into a list, there had to be a better way! Then I got one of those hunches, it might not be a hard-coded limit, maybe it was SQL Server inspired?

I popped open a copy of a MOSS 2007 Content Database on my sandbox environment (‘cause we’d never do that on a Production environment! Right kids?!). The AllLists table seemed to be winking at me straight away, and sure enough it contained a column called tp_ContentTypes. Within that column I could see the Content Type schema for a particular list there in plain text. The data type of the column was ntext. ‘Eureka!’ as a clever naked Greek once famously shouted. NText is 2 gigabytes in size, and that’s where the limit comes from.

There could be some limits in the source code of MOSS as well, but they’d not be too easy to track down! I feel fairly satisfied with the answer.

As for the lack of documentation on the topic, well, I guess this blog post will have to do!

Make Your Fortune from Sharepoint Blogging

JamieMcAllister — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 14:53:00 -0400

The blog is approaching a year old, so I though it'd be fun to show how the visitor numbers have increased for this blog over that time. I use Google Analytics to gather stats about this site. If you haven't checked it out you should. It can also be used on Sharepoint portals, but that's another story. Anyway, I enabled Analytics at the start of February 2008, and this is how the visitor graph looks;

You can see a definate ramp up of visitor numbers there, hitting about 70 a day now. The growth has been steady with a dip for Christmas when people were more concerned with Turkey dinners than Sharepoint. The zig zag nature of the graph amuses me too - no-one is bothered about Sharepoint at the weekend, it's just a work thing OK! ;) I don't have the stats to compare, but it would be interesting to know how Sharepoint adoption grew during the same period.

The next stat shows the visits and page views for the period. Impressed at the average time on page, some of these postings are actually being read!

Where do my blog hits come from? Here is the answer;

1.	United States	2,614
2.	United Kingdom	744
3.	India	603
4.	Canada	436
5.	Netherlands	278
6.	Australia	266
7.	France	212
8.	Germany	182
9.	Denmark	157
10.	Switzerland	151

Our good friends in the USA seem the most interested in Sharepoint. Quite a 'western world' centric set of stats really, except for a very creditable third place by India. [India is the cradle of mathematics, and now an I.T. powerhouse! Some connection perhaps?]

I had 98 countries listed in the stats, want to see the bottom ten?

88.	Uganda	1
89.	Tunisia	1
90.	Iraq	1
91.	Jamaica	1
92.	Dominican Republic	1
93.	Nigeria	1
94.	Sudan	1
95.	Ivory Coast	1
96.	Armenia	1
97.	Georgia	1
98.	Bangladesh	1

So, have my nearly 12k of pageviews made my fortune? Not on your nelly! Here are the earnings stats for this month;

You might conclude that I should take the ads off my site to save space for the articles! They're not exactly meeting my web hosting costs just yet! 2 ad clicks per 550 page impressions is above average as I understand it, so a bit more work to do on my visitor volumes! Time to write a few more articles! Can we get up to 700 a day this time next year?

Programmatically creating Variation Hierarchies in SharePoint 2007

JamieMcAllister — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:14:00 -0400

Some time ago I highlighted a blog post by Michiel Lankamp regarding the creation of Variation Hierarchies through code.

Waldek Mastykarz has posted an interesting article where he builds on Michiel Lankamps work.

The post can be found here;

http://blog.mastykarz.nl/programmatically-creating-variation-hierarchies-sharepoint-2007/

A Festive Post

JamieMcAllister — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:08:00 -0400

One of my relatives wrote this tale of Christmas' past. Set in the period that the country was last bankrupt (50 years later and we're back!!)

When I was a child the one big event of the year apart from your birthday was Christmas.

In the 1950's we didnt receive much in material goods and the thought of receiving presents from Santa Claus was a magical feeling.
I think we appreciated this event so much in those days because of the lack of money and to receive anything wrapped up in Christmas wrapping paper was like being given a million pounds.

I remember that on Christmas Eve, my younger sister and I would be bathed and our hair washed. We would put rags in our hair to give us ringlets as we did not have any electric hair tools like there is now.

We were so excited and we would go to bed with pillowcases looking forward to waking up to a pillowcase full of presents.
We used to wake up about 4 or 5 o'clock with the excitement. We always had an apple and orange in the sack and I would have the Beano annual and my sister would have the Dandy. There would be a few chocolates and the main present which could be a doll or in one year for me was a watch. There wasn't much but it meant the world to me and my sister.

We would sit in the cold room reading our Annuals until Mum woke up and went downstairs to light the coal fire, then we could go downstairs.
We then looked forward to the Christmas dinner. I remember we either had pork or lamb and one year we had a chicken which was unusual as we hardly had chicken in those days.

There was always lots of vegetables and I loved roast potatoes and hated sprouts. It was a glorious time and if it snowed on Christmas day that was a bonus as it was so magical and just like in the movies.

It was also one of the only times we were altogether as a family as my Dad was always working and my two older brothers were at work as they were alot older than my sister and I.

The Christmas tree had a few baubles on it and we never had any lights as they were too expensive then. Loved the whole experience and miss it all now that the kids have grown up, my parents have passed away and all you have is the memory, but it was and is a good memory.

Bless childhood and I wish everyone could have the same love and excitement as we had even though we had nowt' as they say in Yorkshire,

Overriding Sharepoint Page Render method

JamieMcAllister — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:35:00 -0400

Today’s article is taken from another real world problem.

One of my MOSS portals hosts a large amount of Business Process documentation as MOSS Publishing Pages. The original MS Word based documentation that these pages sprang from now bears little relation to the most recent guidance in MOSS.

The business want to be able to transform the MOSS Publishing Pages into “MS Word 2003” compatible documents at will. You might have heard of Document Converters, a MOSS feature that converts documents into publishing pages? This requirement was like that, but in reverse, and definitely not available out of the box.

I quickly identified a commercial component that converts HTML mark-up to Rich Text Format documents. This seemed like an ideal path to take. RTF documents are feature rich enough for what was wanted and compatible with a wide variety of tools. RTF is an International Standard format.

This still left the challenge of where to obtain the HTML representing the Publishing Page content. Using the Sharepoint API it’s easy enough to get hold of the mark-up within the fields of any publishing page. That isn’t enough though because the publishing page you see on screen is created from the content, the page layout, the master page, and CSS melded together.

Back in my ASP.NET days I would’ve solved this problem by overriding the Render method of my ASP.NET page. This would give me the very same mark-up that was being sent to the browser. Ideal as that sounds I realised that I’d not seen a single example of anyone tapping into the Render method of a MOSS Publishing Page anywhere! How do you do it?

The only clue I found was on Zac Smith’s website;

http://www.trinkit.co.nz/blog/archive/2007/04/19/guide-to-making-sharepoint-xhtml-compliant.aspx

Zac had overridden the Render method of Master Pages. His requirement was to clean up the Sharepoint mark-up to make it more XHTML compliant. Alas, Zacs solution didn’t suit me because he was using inline code in the master page. Enabling Inline Code opens up a security can of worms that I don’t even want to think about!

As an alternative, I immediately thought of Andrew Connells article on Sharepoint Code Behind pages; http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/UsingCodeBehindFilesInSharePointSites.aspx

Andrews article deals with the creation of an application page with code behind. It didn’t take much experimentation before I was able to create code behind files for Master Pages, and Page Layouts too. This was just what I wanted.

In the end the Master Page code behind option suited my problem best. I created a custom master page based on the existing custom master page that my portal uses, and added a code behind. Within five minutes I was able to manipulate my Publishing Page mark-up however I liked by overriding Render within the code behind!

After a relatively small amount of fun and games, my Render method looked something like this;

protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)

{

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(sb);

hWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(sw);

base.Render(hWriter); //Get the rendered page

//Write out string to RTF Component HERE

MyVendor.HtmlToRtf.Converter converter = new MyVendor.HtmlToRtf.Converter();

string rtfFile = converter.ConvertString(sb.ToString());

if (rtfFile.Length > 0)

{

Response.Buffer = true;

Response.Clear();

Response.ContentType = "application/msword";

Response.Write(rtfFile);

Response.Flush();

Response.End();

}

So there you have it - full control of your rendered mark-up from Sharepoint. This could help you with XHTML Compliance, Document Output, Mobile Device Rendering, and lots of other neat applications that just need imagining!

Variations Editor version 2 Has Shipped

JamieMcAllister — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:18:00 -0400

Tim Dobrinski has put in even more work to his Variations Editor tool. Not only does it have the Variations fixing abilities of the first version, but now it allows the import and export of variations content between variations sites or beyond (to xml) !! If you saw my prior posts on the import and export of variations content, this is an application of that technique bound up into a professionally developed tool. You don't have to touch Visual Studio yourself to have that power over your variations content!

This tool is solving some very real and serious problems that the current state of Variations may set you. On top of that the tool is free. Do you really need any more encouragement to download it?

Here is his release blog posting;

http://www.thesug.org/blogs/lsuslinky/Lists/Posts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=25

Scoring with Sharepoint - Speaker Dan Holme MVP

JamieMcAllister — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:20:00 -0400

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the ‘Scoring with Sharepoint’ event at the Manchester United stadium, with keynote speaker Dan Holme (MVP Sharepoint). This event was very worthwhile.

Dan proved to be an excellent speaker. His keynote speech covered a brief history of Sharepoint, where we are now, and its likely future. There were plenty of people at the session who are considering adoption of Sharepoint who probably found this useful. For us old Sharepoint dogs I was most interested in the likely future developments. Improvements to Accessibility, easier Silverlight integration, and enhanced Social Networking features are the best things for me so far. Some talk of moving Sharepoint into the clouds via Windows Azure et al had my ears pricked up too – that’s likely to change my working life sometime soon!

During the coffee break, I pitched a question to Dan about displaying Powerpoint presentations in Sharepoint. This question pops up often on user forums, and I wondered what his preferred solution would be. He offered three alternatives which covered the three possibilities I know myself – however I’ve researched answers to the question whereas he was answering a random question without preparation. Proof if any were needed that Dan Holmes Sharepoint knowledge is extensive and deep!

The remaining presentations were ‘Intranet Admin, Security, and Governance’, then a great session titled ‘21st Century File Sharing: Configuring &Managing Document Libraries’, and finally, ‘Building Code Free Sharepoint Applications and Business Intelligence Lite’.

There was a bias towards code-free solutions to Sharepoint problems. As I mentioned in a recent post this is most clients’ greatest wish! Dan demonstrated several ways of getting data in and out of Sharepoint using the tight integration features of Office 2007. He actually went a little further than I’ve seen demonstrated before and I found it useful.

Instead of me summarising the whole session, you’d probably like to know that the presentation foils have been posted at; http://www.regonline.co.uk/builder/site/Default.aspx?eventid=667987

I also notice they currently have a banner for ‘Scoring with Sharepoint’ in Dubai for 9th/10th December 2008. If you are in the area you should try to make that! As I say, it’s a good session, and if your boss gives you hassle you can also point out the session is free! ;)

I have a feeling that the foils may be posted at that address temporarily so you may be interested to know that some of the foils (and other foils from presentations I haven’t even seen) are available from a section in Dan’s company website;
http://share.intelliem.com

The world’s greatest SharePoint admin book is here

JamieMcAllister — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:47:00 -0400

Messiers Todd Klindt, Steve Caravajal, and Shane Young have just released a kick ass book covering all things Sharepoint Admin. It promises to be the definitive tome. Check out Shanes blog post;

http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2008/11/24/the-world-s-greatest-sharepoint-admin-book-is-here.aspx

Riding CAML to avoid getting The Hump

JamieMcAllister — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:35:00 -0400

"the hump, British Slang. a fit of depression or bad humour: to get the hump."

Many months ago I encountered a weird error where content pages in target variations had corrupted text. It all turned out to be an incorrect mapping of Content Types. MOSS Service Pack 1 fixed it, so any page republished after showed the text correctly.

The client got in touch with me recently to say they still had some content pages with the weird characters. Quite a few of their pages hadn’t been re-published yet, but they didn’t know which (they have A LOT of content pages). I was asked to produce a report of the problem pages so the content management people could re-publish them.

This was a bit of an odd problem. What differentiates the corrupted pages from all the other publishing pages in their portal? Well, nothing except the date they were last modified I concluded. I then realised I could provide them with what they need in five minutes flat, using a CAML query.

If you’ve used MOSS, you will have seen the Site Actions -> Reports menu option. You can extend that area with your own reports, and I decided to do that to provide the page update information the client wanted.

Going to Site Actions -> Manage Content and Structure it was easy to see the ‘Content and Structure Reports’ list. This is where the Reports are, and by adding list items your own reports get created too.

To cut a long story short, this is what I came up with;

I added an item with this rather ungainly title (as you’ll see this report won’t be widely seen!).

All I needed to add was a few configuration settings and a CAML query, and we’re done.

Firstly, I want the query to be limited to Publishing Page. These all reside in the ‘Pages’ library of the variations. As such, I placed <Lists ServerTemplate="850"/> in the CAML List Type field. 850 is the Server Template number for the Pages library. (Magic numbers eh?)

Then I put together my query. I need to find items that were last updated before 15^th May 2008, which is roughly when my client installed MOSS SP1. This looked like this;

This says to find items Where the Last Modified Date is Less than OR Equal to 15^th May 2008. (Btw ‘Modified’ is the internal name for Last Modified Date. )

Finally, I didn’t want just anybody to see this report, as it’s for a specific purpose. I added the Content Management group to the Target Audiences box so that only they will see this query.

It’s not a perfect solution. Some of the pages that come up in the query won’t be goosed, but it sure cuts down the number of pages they need to investigate a lot.

Since MOSS 2007 was released, I’ve been doing a lot of work on the public Sharepoint forums to answer user queries, and help overcome their Sharepoint problems. The vast majority of people want quick-hit non-code solutions to their Sharepoint issues. I hope this posting has demonstrated that custom CAML reports can be just such a quick-hit solution. Brushing up on CAML can pay dividends. Of course, you can also just download one of the CAML generator tools out there! Search for CAML on Codeplex.com and you’ll see what I mean! J

Further Customise CQWP to Display Draft and Checked Out Pages By User

JamieMcAllister — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:14:00 -0400

In a recent article I demonstrated how to embed CAML queries into the Content Query Web Part (CQWP). I’m going to take that concept a little further this time by customising the columns output by the CQWP when it returns its query results.

What problem will we be solving? Well I’ve had a lot of feedback from clients who have been editing content in their MOSS publishing sites. If the site is large, they tend to lose track of what pages are currently checked out or in a draft state. MOSS does provide a solution to this via Site Actions -> View Reports -> All Draft Documents . The feedback I get is that this isn’t obvious enough for users, and they want to be notified about content that needs their attention.

The CQWP is an ideal solution to this. I can place two CQWP instances on the front page of the site, one listing all draft documents, the other listing all checked out documents. The end result will look like this;

The document names provide a hyperlink so that the page can be navigated to instantly. A date field is included to give some indication how old the item is. The best bit is that items will be grouped by the user who has altered the page. This provides a bit of ‘name and shame’. You’d be amazed how quickly our authors action their outstanding pages when their check outs are listed for all other authors to see!

Once we have a working CQWP on the page, we’re going to limit it’s visibility via an Audience so that only content Authors and above see it. I’ll also skim over the topic of caching so that we don’t impact our server by firing off these CAML queries on the front page.

Get the CQWP XML

My first article on CQWP details how to get hold of the Web part xml for hand editing. Read that here; http://www.the-north.com/sharepoint/post/Embed-CAML-Queries-into-the-Content-Query-Webpart---Finding-Draft-Publishing-Content.aspx#comment

Override the Query

Also as detailed in that article we need to place our CAML query into the XML.

The All Draft Documents query will look like this;

The All Checked Out Documents Query will look like this (for your second web part);

Notice that these queries are a little different from my first article. This time they have an Order By clause on CheckoutUser. That’s going to help provide our name and shame headings!

Alter the Title

Provide a new title for the CQWP by inserting this;

<property name="Title" type="string">All Draft Documents</property>

If you’re working in a multi-lingual site you might want to replace the title text with a Language Resource File reference instead.

Get the Columns we want

The CAML query can return all sorts of crazy data about the pages in its result set. The CQWP displays the name and description by default. We want the Checkout User for our title, and the last modified date of the page.

We amend the Common View Fields property. The format is “fieldname,type;fieldname,type” without any spaces. The xml is;

<property name="CommonViewFields" type="string">Modified,Text;CheckoutUser,User</property>

Notice that the field names are the internal field names. Should you wish to display different fields to my example, you’ll need to find out the internal field names. This can be done by;

Looking in the Content Type that the field resides in.

Looking in the markup (ListViewXml element) of an AllItems.aspx view that references the field. (Needs Sharepoint Designer and probably too much hassle!)

Vincent Rothwell (aka TheKid) has a reference for some commonfields here;

http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/03/21/wss-field-display-amp-internal-names-for-lists-amp-document-libraries.aspx

Output the Columns

Remember me saying that CQWP outputs the name and description by default? I want to replace description with my Last Modified Date. I therefore perform a rename to fool CQWP into outputting my data;

<property name="DataColumnRenames" type="string">Modified,Description</property>

Order the Output

My CAML query had an Order By on CheckoutUser. Now if I group by that field as well that will give me my user name sub-headings.

We’ve dodged a slight gotcha here. If I hadn’t put the Order By in the query, the Group By would have been ignored. (That originally foxed me for a few minutes I can tell you!).

Tell the Web Part Where to Query

You can do this via the UI, but what the heck. Tell the web part which site it is starting its query at. Just provide a top level url;

Deploy the CQWP

You are now able to save the file, and place the web part on a page. This was detailed in the prior article.

Reducing the Server Load

The CAML query is performing work across several lists. If the page where this CQWP resides were being accessed several times a second, your server is going to be doing a lot of unnecessary work. We are going to use Audiences and caching to reduce the risk of this.

With the CQWP on the page, click into Modify Shared Webpart and open up ‘Advanced’. At the bottom of that section you’ll find a box to specify target audiences;

This allows you to define which groups will see this web part. You might want to include your Authors, Managers, Administrators. Select them via this box dialog. Once the page has been checked in only people you just defined in that Audience box will ever see this web part. Since your general readership no longer see that CQWP the cross list query is not being fired on every page visit.

Save the web part. Check in the publishing page. Our work on this page is done. We now want to set up some caching to further reduce the server load.

Go to the Site Settings page at the top of your site collection. We’re interested in the Site Collection Administration section;

Click into Site Collection Object Cache.

You’ll find a section called ‘Cross List Query Cache Changes’. This should be changed as below;

When we do this we know that maximum the queries in our CQWP will only be run once per minute. This caching means that when an author finally checks in the document that they had locked everyone out of for the past few weeks, their shame will be visible on the screen for perhaps an extra 60 seconds afterwards. A small price to pay to reduce server load!

Remember that this setting change will effect all CQWP cross list queries in the whole site collection. Unlikely to be a big issue, but change this setting with your eyes open to the effect!

That is it. We’ve specified our own query for a CQWP, overridden the columns that are shown in that web part, and taken reasonable steps to ensure our server wasn’t overloaded with work, and it felt good.

One final point. We only added two extra fields in our CommonViewFields property before – Last Modified Date and Checkout User. What if we‘d wanted to have even more fields visible, can it be done? Yes it can. You can put as many fields in CommonViewFields as you like, however there is a big BUT coming…..

…..

BUT the standard XSL that renders the CQWP output won’t handle the extra fields. If you want to do this, you have to go even further than we did today and customise the ItemStyle.xsl for the CQWP. That will be covered in a future article.