Under the Hood: Insight from the Ironworks Technology Group

Next-Gen Business Intelligence: Self-Service Tools for Optimized Decision-Making

2012-05-23T10:50:03-04:00

Companies of all sizes are suddenly overflowing with data that pours in from both internal and external sources. Each department within the company uses the information differently and pulls data in from a unique mix of sources. Many IT departments struggle to keep up with the increasing demand for data and insight. Decision-makers want information that is relevant to their areas of responsibility. They want dashboards that help make sense of the raw data. And they want it in real-time - not in a week or even a day. How can companies keep up with rising expectations to deliver accurate...

MongoDB - Jongo and Morphia

2012-05-08T14:44:14-04:00

Ironworks' Jimmy Ray has his own blog: Avoiding Tech-Sand He recently attended No Fluff Just Stuff in DC and blogged about MongoDB. I liked his post so much that I wanted to share it with you. Please check out Jimmy's blog and follow him on Twitter. When presented with the opportunity to store data into a database without schema restrictions, some of us are hesitant to leap into the NoSQL void. I'm not. I am tired of having to work with RDBMS restrictions for simple data changes in my applications. I am tired of having to cram non-relational domain models...

How to display source site title in Content Query Web Part and Search Results?

2011-12-13T15:27:21-05:00

What? How to display source site title in Content Query Web Part and Search Results? Why? It is a not so uncommon requirement to group documents / list items by sites and display the site title for each group. Content Query Web Part returns lot of data but site title is not returned by it by default. SharePoint search service application does not come with property for site name or site title by default but luckily sharepoint search crawls and indexes site name as ows_sitename How? CQWP: In the .webpart file there is a property called ViewFieldsOverride. This property overrides...

Dynamic Groovy Edges and Regression Isolation

2011-12-07T09:23:42-05:00

In JEE application architecture, components are grouped into functional layers. In a typical multi-tier enterprise web application, there are N layers, N-1 layer junctions, and (N-1) x 2 layer edges. In the diagram below, for example, there are three layers, two layer junctions, and four layer edges. Designing and implementing interfaces between application layers can be painful, especially if you don't have a span of control or even influence design and/or implementation. Interfaces are notorious change zones. Even with well-defined interface contracts, development teams are routinely confronted with interface changes that require quick turnaround times, compounded by development, test, and...

Dealing with SharePoint 2010 calendar's "Add" button issues after fixing the scrolling bug

2011-12-02T10:30:11-05:00

What? How to fix SharePoint 2010 calendar's "Add" button issues after fixing the scrolling bug Why? Every SharePoint designer must have bumped across the scrolling issue with SharePoint 2010 master pages. Kyle Schaeffer & Greg Galipeau have already written excellent post 1 & excellent post 2 about this issue and how to fix it and so I am not going into details of the issue and how to fix it. Of course, with any solution that changes the core way a system works, there is bound to be issues. One such issue is with the OOB calendar web part's "Add"...

JEE Developers: Embrace the Polyglot in You

2011-11-21T22:09:07-05:00

Are you a polyglot programmer? The term almost has a guttural pronunciation. In short, a polyglot person has the ability to speak multiple languages. So, a polyglot programmer is one who can write code in multiple languages. Most programmers I know are polyglots out of necessity or career evolution. I started out with BASIC, then moved to LabVIEW, HTML, Visual Basic and even Lotus Notes, settling into Java and its cohorts later on. Along the way I wrote C and C++ when the need arose, as well as the suite of UNIX/Linux scripting languages (Perl, Korn, Python, etc.). Most of...

Incomplete SharePoint 2010 SPWebPartManager and its events that are never raised

2011-11-08T23:44:08-05:00

What? Incomplete SharePoint 2010 SPWebPartManager and its events that are never raised Why? The SPWebPartManager in SharePoint 2010 is incomplete. Some of its events are never raised and even if they are raised they don't work as expected. Recently I was working on a scenario where I had to restrict users from being able to add certain web parts to certain web part zones in the page. There is no such property in the web part zone that we can use to achieve this kind of functionality. However there are other useful properties that a web part zone offers such...

SQL Server 2012

2011-10-25T16:27:11-04:00

Microsoft’s newest version of SQL Server, previously designated as Code Name Denali, won’t be released until next year, but the good folks in Redmond have made a CTP (Community Technical Preview) available for trial. This is the third and likely last preview prior to the rumored release sometime in the first quarter of 2012. SQL Server 2012’s enhancements are wide ranging, from new T-SQL functionality to the AlwaysOn capability that has DBA’s raving. Most important to my role, however, are the upgrades it brings to Microsoft’s Business Intelligence platform. This will be a two part series delving into more detail...

SharePoint 2010: User Profiles configured correctly but people search not working

2011-10-20T16:59:03-04:00

What? Is the user profiles service application configured correctly but people search not working? As you can see in the below screenshot, the user profile service is able to synchronize properly with AD and pull user profiles. When I searched for a user from a SharePoint site using people search results web part, no profiles were returned. I have also tried the query service web service (/_vti_bin/search.asmx) with no luck. Why? I realized that the user profile service application was created after the search service application was created and therefore the SPS3 protocol that SharePoint uses for reading profiles was...

SharePoint 2010 - How to Backup/Restore Managed Metadata from one farm/environment to another?

2011-10-20T11:40:18-04:00

What? SharePoint 2010 - How to Backup/Restore Managed Metadata from one farm/environment to another? Why? You will be amazed by the lack of proper import/export functionality. It is quite a general requirement to migrate Managed Metadata Service / Termsets from one environment to the other. There are a few approaches to backup/restore managed metadata between environments. OOB, SharePoint 2010 allows for ONLY importing managed metadata in CSV format. You are required to use Powershell / Object Model to build the csv file. Here is a script that can do it. Managed metadata terms and termsets each have a unique guid....