Sharing My Experiences

Resolved: Unattended Service Account Application ID is not specified or value is invalid value.

2011-12-17T15:36:00.000-08:00

This is more just for a reference for myself and for others, below is a link that can resolve the "Unattended Service Account Application ID is not specified or value is invalid value." error that you might see in the Health Analyzer Reports in Central Adminstration. I suggest creating a new Target Application ID to keep it seperate from existing Target Application IDs that you have in your SharePoint farm. Enjoy !!!
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh204612.aspx

Contact lists does not appear as an option when creating a list instance in VS 2010

2011-09-26T18:41:00.000-07:00

Hey Readers,
I wanted share something quick with you that I've found when creating a list instance in Visual Studio 2010. One of the tasks that I was working on wanted me to create a new list instance in Visual Studio 2010 which would be based on a contact list template. First I created a list instance using the SharePoint Customization Wizard by providing a unique name and then it asked "Which lists do you want to instantiate?"
See Figure 1.1 & 1.2

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

As you can see from the image above, the contact list option was not avaliable to select. After a few mintues of poking around on my SharePoint site I realize that I needed to activate the Team Collaboration Lists feature; which is web scoped level feature that can be found under Site Settings -> Manage Site features; provides team collaboration capabilities by provisioning standard lists such as document libaries, issues list, contact list and more. By default this feature is not activated on a site's that is provisioned with a publishing site template, which in my case was true. See Figure 1.3

Figure 1.3

After activating the feature on my publishing site and starting over again with the process of creating an list instance in visual studio, I can now see and choose the Contact list option. See Figure 1.4
Figure 1.4

That's it. Let me know what you think.

Thanks for stopping by...

RoundPic

2011-07-05T18:46:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone, I found this cool tool online called RoundPic. RoundPic allows you to do rounded corners on any image you upload. Just upload the image and click the Round It button, vola!!! You now have an image that has rounded corners. You can also specify height and width, select which corners to be rounded, set the background color or set it to be transparent and finally you can set the roundness for each corner. Check it out and let me know what you think.

http://www.roundpic.com/

Just rambling about SharePoint

2011-06-26T18:25:00.000-07:00

As I was reading the Sharepoint 2010 Architecture Overview article, specifically on the code execution and access constrains on sandbox solutions section. I started to think is Microsoft pushing us to think and develop solutions in the cloud? I would say so. If you take a look at the development constrains for the SharePoint Online, their similar to the development constrains for SharePoint 2010 sandbox solutions. The more that read about sandbox solutions and cloud computing within the context of Microsoft, the more I get confused on with Microsoft's direction for SharePoint. Seems like to me that the cloud is the future, but my concern with this and its always been my concern is with security. Are companies trusting and hosting their highly sensitive data to cloud providers such as Microsoft? I'm curious on your thoughts about SharePoint Online, cloud computing in general and the future for SharePoint..

Powershell: Start-SPAssignment

2011-06-19T15:06:00.000-07:00

Hey readers, today while I was researching powershell cmdlets for a deployment script that I was writing, I came across Start-SPAssignment. Basically it allows you to assign a variable to a list of objects and provides you the ability dispose of those objects at any time in the script. You can assign a list of objects, like your SPSite, SPWeb objects and dispose of them when you no longer need them. Pretty cool...I see this being very useful in memory intensive powerhsell applications..

Lesson Learned #1 - SmallSearchInputBox Delegate Control

2011-06-16T03:01:00.000-07:00

This week, while I was working on a SharePoint branding project I came across an issue where my custom master page was braking the OOTB Page Approval workflow page. For hours I was banging my head, comparing my custom master page with other OOTB master pages and then finally I saw difference. Since one of the project requirements was to move the SmallSearchInputBox delegate control towards the top where the Ribbon Server control lives, I forgot to wrap the PlaceHolderSearchArea control around the delegate control. My guess is that some page layouts implement the PlaceHolderSearchArea control.

Lesson Learned !!!!!

Sharepoint tip

2011-05-30T19:22:00.001-07:00

Inside of your master page or page layouts you should only have one form tag.

Using Javascript to provision SharePoint sites

2011-04-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

In today's post I'm going to show how you can leverage SharePoint's ECMAScript client object model to provision sites in SharePoint 2010. Thought out this post I will use a sample application that I wrote that leverage the capabilities to use provision and removes sites.

Application Overview

Figure 1 shows the sample application that I will use in my post. The application is hosted inside of a content editor web part which displays two tabs;one tab provides the capability to provision a site and the other provides the capability to delete a site. Very simple application and you can deploy it outside of SharePoint as well, with some minor tweaks to my sample you can host this inside of a .net page outside of SharePoint...Pretty cool huh..Now let's take a look at the "Provision Sites" tab, first we'll dive into how the application works and then wrap up by taking look at the code base.

Figure 1

Provision Sites tab
The purpose of this tab is provide the capability to provision a new site. Users will populate the form fields to set properties of their new site such as the title, url, web template....Below is a list of the form fields users will fill out:

Site Title allows you provide a title for your site.
Site Url allows you to define a url to your site.
Site Description allows you to provide a description for your new site.
Use Same Permission As Parent Sites determine if your new site should inherit permissions from the parent site or not.
Select a Category and Choose a Web Template works together like a cascading drop down lists; the Select a Category provides a list of categories to choose from, when you select a category the Choose a Web Template list will dynamically populate with all activated site templates that is assign to the selected category. Once you have selected a web template, below you will see the name and description of the selected web template See Figure 3 and 4.

Figure 2

Figure 3 - shows a list of categories.

Figure 4 - shows a list of web templates based on the Collaboration category.

Click the "Provision New Site" button once the form is completed, then you should see a link to your new site and a notification message letting you know that your site has been created, see Figure 5.

Figure 5

Click on the link to navigate to your new site, see Figure 6.

Figure 6

Simple huh!! Now let's dive into the code base. Figure 7 shows code that does the following:

Load the sp.js file first and once completed call the init function.
Attaching the onchange events to the category and web template select lists.
Then leverages the client object model to retrieve web templates from the site collection using the getAvailableWebTemplates(lcid, doIncludeCrossLanguage) method which returns a collection of web templates. See Figure 7.

We will use this to populate the Select a Category list.

Figure 7

Figure 8 provides the code details on how the category select list is populated. One thing to note here is the SP.WebTemplate.get_isHidden method; this determines if the site definition configuration should be displayed in the UI when creating new sites. We need to make sure that we do not display site templates that are no longer used in SharePoint 2010 because they could be deprecated and contain features that are no longer use in SharePoint 2010. If the method returns false then I'm invoking the SP.WebTemplate.get_displayCategory method to retrieve the web template's category value to add to the category list. Next we will take a look how the web template select list is populated, similar to Figure 8, but now we display web templates where the web template's category is equal to the selected category.

Figure 8

Figure 9 shows the code base to populate the web template select list. The function ShowWebTemplatesBySelectedCategory function is responsible for populating the web template select list; this method is called once a category has been selected. Similar logic populating the category select list, but now we're displaying the web template name. Next let's look at the code to provision a site.

Figure 9

ProvisionNewSite function is responsible to provision the new sites. First the function retrieves the data from the form and then it leverages the client object model's SP.WebCreationInformation class to provision a new site. Once we've created the object and filled out the necessary properties, we add the SP.WebCreationInformation object to the SP.Web class, call the Sp.Web.Update method to provision our new site. Now this doesn't actually happen until after you call the invoke the SP.ClientContext's load and executeQueryAsync methods. See Figure 10.

Figure 10

If all goes well, then you should see a link below the button that will take you to your new site and a notification message letting you know that your site has been created. Figure 11 shows the code that displays the notification message both on the succeeded and failure functions.

Figure 11

Cool huh? With little code you can provision sites on the using javascript. Next we're going to take at "Manage Sites" tab; we'll review the application first, its purpose and then the code.

Manage Sites tab

The Manage Sites tab is a smaller form which sole purpose is to delete a site. Figure 12 shows a list of all subsites that a user chooses from, once a site has been selected details about the site such as the relative URL, title and description. See Figure 13

Figure 12

Figure 13

To remove the site click on the "Remove Selected Site" button which deletes the site and you will see an alert button letting you know that your site has been deleted, see Figure 14.

Figure 14

See Figure 15 shows the Sites and Workspaces page which provides further proof that you site has been deleted.

Figure 15

Easy, huh? So is the code base. ShowAllSubSites and onGetAllSubsitesSucceeded functions, shown in Figure 16, is responsible for populating the select list with subsites. Once thing to note here is the ShowAllSubSites function is called when the user clicks on the "Manage Sites" tab, see Figure 17 for the html code.

Figure 16

Figure 17

Once a site has been selected, basic properties about the site are displayed to the use, shown in Figure 18. The DisplayWebsiteProperties function accepts a singe parameter; WebsiteUrl which is passed to the SP.ClientContext constructor so can do some work on the site I selected. Now we can gather and display the site's properties; checkout the onDisplayWebSitePropertiesSucceeded function for details.

Figure 18

RemoveSite function is called once the Remove Selected Site button is clicked. All we're doing here is creating an instance of the SP.ClientContext object based on the site that we want to delete and then we're calling the SP.Web.deleteObject() method to actually delete the site, see figure 19. Once the site has been deleted, you will see an alert message letting you know that your site has been deleted, take a look at the onSiteDeletedSucceeded function for details.

Figure 19

And that's it folks.

Conclusion

In conclusion you can leverage the SP.WebCreationInformation class to provision sites on the fly and the SP.Web.deleteObject method to delete sites. You can take this example and extended into the areas of user management; leveraging the SP.User, SP.UserCreationInformation and SP.Web classes to add/modify/remove users from a particular site.

Well I hope this post was informative and motivates to take a look at SharePoint's Client Object Model. Let me know if you have any questions or comments regarding this post or in anything general. Thanks!!

Sample Source Code

Sharepoint 2010 & BCS: Collaboration Hub

2011-04-12T17:03:00.001-07:00

Hey readers, found this great article on How SharePoint 2010 Can Be Used as a Collaboration Hub which provides a senario where Sharepoint 2010 and BCS pulls/pushes data from three different external systems giving project managers the capability to work with each system within Sharepoint.

Video: Creating an Excel Services and Bing Maps Mash-up for SharePoint 2010 Using the Excel Services ECMAScript Object Model

2011-04-09T18:08:00.000-07:00

Found this awesome video on using ECMAScript Object Model with Excel Services and Bing Maps. A great example of using javascript, Bing Maps and Excel Services to create a pretty useful application. Little code, no assembly to be deployed, just an excel spreadsheet and a little javascript magic. Nice!!!

Link to video: Creating an Excel Services and Bing Maps Mash-up for SharePoint 2010 Using the Excel Services ECMAScript Object Model

Video on Creating Documents with SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflows

2011-04-08T16:24:00.000-07:00

Cool YouTube video on creating documents with SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflows. Nice Stuff!!!....One thing that I notice is that the author uses a regular workflow instead of using Resusable Workflows which allows you to attach a workflow to a specific content type. Either way it works and its another example how powerful SharePoint's OOTB features are.

The video can also be found at SharePoint Magazine: Creating Documents with SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflows.

Cloud Computing on the rise.

2011-04-04T09:41:00.001-07:00

Found an interesting article regarding a study on cloud computing as it relates to the role of IT (Cloud computing elevating the role of IT: study). Its interesting that 70% of respondents believe that CIO's and senior IT staff will have a business background as opposed to a technology background in the future. Will we see a movement of power users in IT as oppose to hard core programmers? I still think we'll have programmers, but I agree with the article in that their role will be more of managing service providers than providing customize application features. This sounds like SharePoint Online to me...Former pprogrammers are now SharePoint administrators on business end, mainly acting in the help desk role to contact Microsoft when an application goes down and little programming opportunities (Sandbox Solutions) and Power Users as content developers using SharePoint Designer or a web browser to deploying applications to the business. Just my opinion. What's your thoughts?

Plan browser support for Sharepoint Server 2010

2011-04-03T18:07:00.001-07:00

Plan browser support (SharePoint Server 2010)

Its werid to see that the 64-bit versions of IE(7, 8 & 9) are not fully supported as their 32-bit counterparts. Your thoughts?

Using Javascript to access an external list in SharePoint 2010.

2011-04-02T19:14:00.000-07:00

In today's post let's take a look at leveraging SharePoint's ECMAScript Client Object Model to access an external list data. In this post we're going to cover:

Using javascript and the client object model to build a products search application that returns products from an external list.
Host the application in side of a content editor webpart.

Let's begin by taking a look at the Products external list.

Products External List

Figure 1 shows a list of products external list which is view from the AdventureWorks.Products sql table. Using external content types and lists provides you with the capabilities to connect and manipulate data from external systems such as a web service, sql server database or from a .NET assembly. Leveraging SharePoint Designer 2010 or Visual Studio 2010 provides the tools that's need to craete external content types and lists to be consume in SharePoint or in other applications. For more information about BCS, external content types and lists check out Microsoft Business Connectivity Services. Now that we have a list of products to work with, next we will leverage SharePoint's client object model to extract and display products based on user's search requests.

Figure 1

Leveraging SharePoint's Client Object Model to access external list data.

Figure 2 and 3 shows will show you the end results. Users will type in the first letter or two, click on the search button and the application returns a list of products based on the user's search request.

Figure 2

Figure 3

To begin we need to add a content editor webpart to host the application.. Add the web part to the home page and then we need to edit html source for the web part. Figure 4 shows the location of the edit inside of the ribbon. Inside of the HTML editor copy and paste the javascript source code thats located as a file to download at the end of this blog post.

Figure 4

Notice in the source code the CAML query and the 'Include' statement inside of the clientContext.load method. Both are required to access data from an external list. See Figure 5

Figure 5

Inside of the CAML query the Method tag provides the operation name used to query the Products list.. The Name attribute is where you specify the name of the operation. Note that the value of the Name attribute should be a valid operation that exists in the external content type. See Figure 6 shows you list of operations that the external content type supports.

Figure 6

The ViewFields tag requires you to include all fields that anoperation returns. Remember confuring your external content type and in the wizard the their step Return Parameters ? In this step you can specify the fields that you want to return for an operation. Figure 7 shows the button to edit a selected operation and Figure 8 shows the Return Parameter step where you can configure the operation's return fields. Finally in the clientContext.load method the 'Include' statement makes the fields available to use in the onQuerySucceeded function.

Figure 7

Figure 8

Let's recap

Using BCS provides you the capabilities to expose external data using external content types and lists.
Leveraging the Client Object Model you can access external list data and expose it to the client.
The Method tag specifies the CURD operations to use whne querying an external list. This gives you the ability to implement select, update and delete CAML querites against external lists.
Make sure you include all fields that anoperation returns inside of the ViewFields tags. Do the same for the 'Include' statement inside of the clientContext.load method as well.

For a copy of the AdventureWorks database check out this link: Microsoft SQL Server Database Product Samples.

Sample Source Code:

Cognizant Boosts Efficiency, Cuts Costs, with Collaboration and Development Platform

2011-03-26T07:28:00.000-07:00

Hey readers, check out this case study how Congizant, a global provider of IT, consulting and business processing outsourcing, leveraged SharePoint Server 2010 to improve efficiency, cutting cost and bringing collaboration within their company. Just awesome!!!! Let me know your thoughts....

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000008719

Passed MCTS 70-667 exam

2011-03-18T18:46:00.000-07:00

Passed!!!! 783 score!!!!!

Access denied by Business Data Connectivity - Solution

2011-03-18T18:37:00.000-07:00

Just a FYI for folks trying to setup BCS. After setting up your external list, if you navigate to this list in SharePoint you might receive the following error: "Access denied by Business Data Connectivity". If so, then follow the instructions in this link. Also, replicate the same permissions to the "Set Metadata Store Permission" section. Since the metadata store contains all the models, external content types, methods and methods instances you need to set the permissions for your users to interact with metadata components, such as external content types. For more information regarding your permission options in the metadata store, check out Business Connectivity Services security operations (SharePoint Foundation 2010) which provides a set of security related admin task for your BCS service application.

I hope you learn something, let me know what think.....

Something I learned about wss and moss for SharePoint 2007

2011-03-10T15:17:00.001-08:00

In wss the spell checking feature on a wss list is not avaliabe to users and you don't have the option to activate it on site, site collection nor in ca. In moss there is a feature within ca that you activate or deactivate. Took me about 2 hours to figure this hours, grr.

Well I hope you learn something.

Using the ECMAScript Client Object Model to display all sub sites from your top level site in SharePoint Server 2010

2011-01-12T17:50:00.000-08:00

Hey readers, I wanted to share with you a solution that I came up with on how to show all sub sites from your top level site using SharePoint's ECMAScript Client Object Model. Let’s get started!!!

First, add a Content Query Web Part to your home page.

Home page view after adding the content query web part.

Next, edit the web part by clicking on the down arrow next to the checkbox and select the ‘Edit Web Part’ menu item.

Now we need to do some HTML editing within the Content Query Web Part. To do this we must double click on the content ‘Click here to add new content’, then select the HTML button towards the far right of the ribbon and select ‘Edit HTML Source’ menu item.

Now you should see the HTML Source dialog window appear. Within this window I want you to add the following code below.

ExecuteOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded method?
This method accepts two parameters, your function name and one of SharePoint's scripting files which is required inorder for you to interact with SharePoint. In my solution, the sp.js file provides you with the ability to retrieve site information, list information, even allows you to perform CURD operations against a single list and more. Before we can do this we first allow the sp.js to load, which is the purpose of the ExecuteOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded method, once the file is loaded then your method is executed. There’s a bunch more scripting files which allows you to interaction with other areas of SharePoint check out ECMAScript Class Library for more information.

ShowAllSubSites first establishes a connection to SharePoint by creating an instance of the SP.ClientContext object, similar to SPContext object. Now that I have a connection establish I can begin with retrieving all my child sites by using the ctx.get_web().get_webs() method. In short, this retrieves all sub sites for the current web application. Finally, we call the executeQueryAsync method which does async request back to SharePoint to retrieve all child sites from your top level site. If the call was successful then the onUpdate method is executed, else the onFail method is executed.

After a successful call, now we need to loop though the this.webSubSites collections object to print all child sites to the screen.

Here is your end result:

So here's a simple way to retreive all subsites using the ECMAScript client object model provided to you by SharePoint. You could a data view web part or a content query web part, but then you're working with xslt and I haven't master xslt.....yet!! Well I hope you’ve learned something from this post, let me know if you like it or not. Other than that, thanks for stopping by. Below is a list of articles that I used to achieve this solution.

References:

ULSViewer

2010-09-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

For SharePoint 2010 Developers - I found this cool tool that traces in real time your SharePoint log file and helps outs with the ambiguous "Correlation ID" errors that SharePoint provides. ULS Viewer . Check it out and let me know what you think about it.

What really motivates us? Is it money?

2010-06-04T20:41:00.000-07:00

Hey readers,

I found this cool video presentation on Stephen Forte`s Blog that talks about the surprising truth about what motivates us. David Pink is the speaker and he explains they various factors that really motivates really us in the work place. What I took from this is that money is a motivator, that obvious, the higher the pay, the better performance. If you remove the worries of money, meaning if you pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table, then instead of money leading to better performance, now you have 3 factors that lead to better performance; autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy describes our desire to be self directed, which management wants. Manages expects their employees to be self-directed, not be dependent on their managers to direct them. Next you have mastery which describes our urge to get better at stuff, so for example I enjoy programming on the weekend, working with WCF, SQL Server, ASP.NET, etc., some might think that I'm acting irrational for doing work and not getting paid for it, so why do I do it? Because I love programming, learning, doing something new provides me with a feeling of self satisfaction and accomplishment and I can use my skills to produce applications where users can benefit from.....Then finally you have purpose, where purpose is to be a better an employee, putting yourself in a position where you can help others and be more effective when engaging with the company clients. Its an interesting video post. Check it out and post your reactions.....I'll be waiting....Below is the link

What really motivates us?

SOA Spending on the Rise. Surprised? Here's Why

2010-05-22T10:00:00.000-07:00

Hey Readers,
I found an interesting article on "SOA spending on the rise". The article explains that the use SOA best practices with in projects are the reason why SOA spending is increasing. .The link is below, let me know you what think about it.....Enjoy

SOA Spending on the Rise. Surprised? Here's Why

A loop hole in social networking sites security

2010-02-07T18:15:00.000-08:00

Hey readers, I wanted to share with you a loop hole that I've found with social networking sites and their security. Please note, I'm not a hacker and I've found this using my own account. Last night I was trying to access my MySpace account and I forgot my password. I requested to retrieve my password by clicking on the 'Forgot your password' link, this is a link that all social networking sites provide just in case if you forget your password, see Figure 1. Next I was taken to another page where it would ask me to provide my email address that I used when creating my MySpace account, see Figure 2. Remember when signing up for MySpace, they would required you to put in a contact email address? Well this is the reason why, so they can send you information on how to change your , instead of posting your password a separate page. Hackers could easily retrieve your password if MySpace just posted your password on a separate page by supplying your email address and clicking the submit button.

Next, I provided my email account and click submit and I got a message back stating that my password information was sent to my email address, then the light came on. I had deleted this email account months ago, so MySpace sent an email message to an email account that no longer exists. I went back to the provider where I had created my email account from before and I checked to see if that email account was still available, and it was. I re-created the account and went back to MySpace, clicked on the 'Forgot your password' link, supplied my old email address which has now been recreated and active to accept email messages, clicked the submit button and then went back to my now recreated email account inbox and I saw the email message to change my MySpace password was there.

Figure 1

Figure 2

The moral of this story, if you have email accounts tied to social networking sites or any online account, I suggest changing deleted email address tied on your social networking sites as well as any other online accounts that you may have. If you have any questions or comments regarding this post, please provide your comments in the 'Comments' section for this post.

Thank You,

Two ways to access a WCF RESTful service from a client

2010-02-06T09:28:00.000-08:00

Hey readers, I want to show you two ways to access a WCF RESTful service from the client. Let's dive in!!!.

First let's take a look at the service implementation. This service a RESTful service which provides product information and returns the data in a JSON format. In this service I have an interface named IProduct which defines my service contact and two operation contracts. GetAllProducts returns a generic lits of product objects, and GetProductByID returns a single product object based on a product id. The attributes that appear on top of each method defines the details of how the service will accept and respond to service calls. For more information on this I suggest reading "How to: Create a Basic WCF REST service". Figure 1 shows you the interface definition, Figure 2 shows you Product data contact definition and Figure 3 shows you the code implementation for each operational method .

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

There's one thing to note here in Figure 3, at the top of the class I have an attribute called "ServiceBehavior" and that sets the InstanceContextMode to PerCall. The InstanceContextMode specifies the number of service instances available for handling calls.By using the PerCall enumeration we're saying that an InstanceContext object is created before and destroyed after each call is made. Its important to set the InstanceContextMode to PerCall to increase performance when accepting incoming requests. The other options are PerSession and Single which can be used for scenarios where a services that accepts a lot of incoming requests, you would want to keep the InstanceContext session alive until the session has expired. Be careful because you can have a situation where you have a boat load of sessions existing on server which could hurt your server and service performance. Next, let's take a look how to access this service using jQuery and Sys.Net.Request

Using jQuery or Sys.Net.WebRequest to access a WCF RESTful service
First, lets take a look at the interface. Just as a note, the interface will be the same for both the jQuery and Sys.Net.WebRequest examples. Figure 4 shows the browsers view, the interface is divided into two sections, the first section shows a listing of all products and the second section shows a single product based on a product id.

Figure 4

jQuery:

Now that we defined our interface let's take a look at the code behind. First we need to add a script reference to the jQuery library so we can invoke our service operational methods, see Figure 5.

Figure 5

Next we need to implement code to retrieve all products, by invoke the "GetAllProducts" method, see Figure 6. "ShowAllProducts()" function uses the jQuery's $.ajax method to make an ajax request using the service url value which is the url to our web service, request type which is a GET , the type of data that we're expecting back from the server,which is JSON and then finally we need to register functions to call when the web request has ran successfully or unsuccessfully. If no errors has been thrown, "OnSuccessGetAllProducts" is called which returns a 'GetAllProductsResult' array object. The 'GetAllProductsResult' is the name of the JSON array object which I use to display all products to the browser.

Figure 6

Take a look at Figure 7, both figure 6 & 7 are almost identical with the exception that the GetProductByID function requires a product id. We now retrieve this product id from text input made by the user. Now that we have the product id, we need to append the product to the service url to satisfy the URLTemplate property requirement. If you remember when we created the GetProductByID operation method, the URLTemplate property was define as "/GetProductByID/{ProductID}", if defined in any other way when making a request to that method, will result in an error. Here is the service url value that we will use to retrieve the requested single product," url: "http://localhost:3284/CSWS/Services/ProductServices.svc/GetProductByID/"+productID+"" ". All we have to do now is to display the product to the user which is handle by "OnSuccessGetProductByID" function and display the single product to the user. The results are stilled return as JSON array with the name of GetProductByIDResult, but since the array has only one element we don't need to use a loop to display the contents.

Figure 7

To get more information about jQuery, please check out this link, JQUERY.

Sys.Net.WebRequest

Sys.Net.WebRequest provides you the ability to make web request on the client. For more information, check out the Sys.Net.WebRequest documentation. Before we being, we must add a ScriptManager control to the page, its required in order to invoke web requests with the Sys.Net.WebRequest object. Figure 8 shows you the full implementation for retrieving all products.

Figure 8

Take a look at the ShowAllProducts function. As you can see that I have created a Sys.Net.WebRequest object, but before we can make our request we need to provide some information to this object. The first thing we need to provide is the url by setting the set_url property. This tells the Sys.Net.WebRequest instance where to send the request to using your service url. The next item that we need to provide is the type of request that we're making, by setting the set_httpVerb property which in my example I set value to do a "GET" request. Next, I'm going to skip over the set_body and .get_headers()["Content-Length"] properties, since they really don't have any significant value in my example, but just for your knowledge, the set_body property allows you to set the body part of a request and the .get_headers() property allows you to set custom headers for a request. The last property that I'm setting is the add_completed which registers a handler for the completed request event of the Web request object, its similar to the "success:" element that I used in my jQuery example. In this example I set this value to GetAllProductsHandler. Finally we use invoke method which beings the web request. Let's see how I processed the response results by using the GetAllProductsHandler function.

GetAllProductsHandler function is pretty simple, we first check to see if we have a response by checking if the executor.get_responseAvailable value is true. If true, then we need to use the executor.get_responseData to retrieve the response results and store them into a local variable called serviceResults. Next we need to transform the response results into a format we can process using plain old javascript code, in this case I'm using the eval function.. Now that we have the results into a format that we can use, we can work with data in the same way as we did with jQuery example. First, we make a call to the GetAllProductsResults JSON array which contains a list of all products, then we use a for loop to display all products. That's it. Figure 9 will show you the implementation for retrieving a single product based on a product id. I'll skip the details on this since the code is almost identical to how we retrieve all products with one exception, the _set_url property value appends a product id.

Figure 9

In summary, both using jQuery and Sys.Net.WebRequest provide valuable options to access web resources. In my opinion, I think using the Sys.Net.WebRequest class is easier to use because the classes and syntax are familiar to me as if I was writing server side code with C#. Even though its required to have an instance of the ScriptManager control on the page before you can use the Sys.Net.WebRequest object, but the same is true for jQuery, before you can make any Ajax calls you need to include a script reference to the jQuery library. Maybe in a future article I go over the difference between the two and see which is better.

I hope you enjoy this article. Below is a link to download the sample code used in this post. Please post your comments and let me know what you think. Thank You

IP Law and Third Party Software Licencing usage in IT orginzations

2010-02-03T19:03:00.000-08:00

Today, I had an interesting conversation about intellectual property law and third party software licencing usage in IT shops. An IT shop purchases a third party software product with a developer licence which means you can only use this software in a non-production/commercial server. If the IT shop decides to use this software on their production/commercial server without buying a commercial licence, then the company can be liable for patent infringement. Has anyone experience this before? Please share, I'm interested in hearing your comments.