All about Microsoft.NET & MOSS

Adding a Description for SharePoint Designer Workflow

2009-08-13T22:22:00.000-07:00

I have seen this question in many places “How to add description for a SharePoint Designer Workflow?” I had the same requirement; googling does not give me the result to achieve the same :-). See the image of a sample workflow generated by SharePoint Designer.

Unfortunately, SharePoint Designer does not provide an option for adding workflow description. I have looked at the files which is generated by designer, but unsuccessful. See the files generated by a SharePoint Designer Workflow

The finally I decided to write a piece of code using SharePoint Object Model to achieve the same.

private void AddWorkflowDescription(string siteURL, string listName, string workflowName, string workflowDesc)
{
using (SPSite site = new SPSite(siteURL))
{
using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
{
SPList _linksList = web.Lists[listName];

foreach (SPWorkflowAssociation _wfAssoc in _linksList.WorkflowAssociations)
{
if (_wfAssoc.Name.ToLower().Equals(workflowName))
{
_wfAssoc.Description = workflowDesc;
_linksList.UpdateWorkflowAssociation(_wfAssoc);
break;
}
}
}
}
}

Feature Activated Code

public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
{
string _siteURL = "http://mossserver:4545/sites/Demo/";
string _listName = "Links";
string _workflowName = "workflow 1";
string _workflowDesc = "Workflow Descriptiopn updated by code";
AddWorkflowDescription(_siteURL, _listName, _workflowName, _workflowDesc);
}

I have added this code in my “Feature Activated” event. The following image shows a SharePoint designer workflow with description which is generated by the above code.

Note:
If you just want to run this code only once then create a Console Application / Windows application to execute the above code.

Flash Tag Cloud in SharePoint using jQuery

2009-08-07T08:25:00.000-07:00

This post uses WP-Cumulus plugin and SharePoint Content Editor Web Part to display Tags or any SharePoint list data in 3D format. The data from SharePoint list has been queried using jQuery. See the below screens which shows Tag Cloud in a SharePoint Page.

See the Tag Cloud in action here.

WP-Cumulus

WP-Cumulus allows you to display your site's tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D. There are different configuration options available like changing the color, style etc

For more information refer the following link (download)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cumulus/

jQuery

jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML. Refer the interesting post from Jan Tielens to query SharePoint list data using jQuery.
For more information refer the following link

http://jquery.com/

Here the Steps to create Tag Cloud using SharePoint list data with the use of jQuery.

Upload WP-Cumulus Files

You can use “Shared Documents” or create a new Document Library to hold the necessary files. I have created a new Document Library called “Tag Cloud” to hold the Tag Cloud related files. Download the WP-Cumulus from the above specified link, I have used version - 1.21. Extract the files and upload “swfobject.js” and “tagcloud.swf” files to the document library.

Creating a SharePoint list for holding Tag details

Create a SharePoint list with the following fields. You can see the list “Tags” with sample data in first screen.

Field Name - Type - Description

Tags - Single Line of Text - This field holds the Tag name
Link - Single Line of Text - This field points to the Tag Link
Style - Single Line of Text - This field holds a style number

Adding Content Editor Web part

Open your page (where you want to display Tag Cloud) in Edit Mode (Site Actions --> Edit Page), add Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) to any one Web part Zone. Copy and Paste the following code to the Source Editor of CEWP.

Note:

If you want the Tag Cloud in all other pages then add CEWP to the master page)

Script

<div id="flashcontent">This will be shown to users with no Flash or Javascript.</div>

Note:

Replace the text marked in red with your respective document library relative path, list name and field names.

A dynamic Tag Cloud is ready, now you can add/ modify the “Tags” list data and it will be reflected in Tag Cloud.

Creating Custom Permissions in SharePoint

2009-08-05T07:35:00.000-07:00

SharePoint provides simple UI to create custom permissions or customize existing permissions. This post will guide you to create a permission level which allows a user to create, update items in list but not allow deleting the same.

Follow the below steps to create a new permission level

Navigate to Site Actions --> Site Settings --> Advanced Permissions

This page displays the complete list of user groups and their respective permission levels. Click on the group to add / remove associated permission levels

Go to Settings --> Permission Levels to create a new permission / customize an existing one.

To customize the existing permission level, click on the permission level and check / un-check the permission check boxes to match your requirement.

I am going to create a new permission level “Low Contribute”, which allow a user to add, update an item but not delete. A little bit of customization to the Contribute permission level will give us the desired functionality. Click on “Copy Permission Level” which will copy the permission level, give a name to this permission level (“Low Contribute”).

Create the new permission level by un-checking “Delete Items” and “Delete Versions” from “List Permissions” section. The following screen shows a user with “Low Contribute” permission.

Note: The security trimmed menu does not have the Delete option.

Adding Custom New Icon using CEWP in SharePoint

2009-08-03T08:20:00.000-07:00

This post uses JavaScript with Content Editor Web Part to add custom new icon.

Use the following approach if your site is not a multilingual one. To achieve the same in multilingual sites, a more dynamic approach is required. New Icon can be found in images of 1033 (English) folder. Each language will have a respective new icon.I have created four icons for this post and placed in 12 Hive\Template\Layouts\Images\Icons.

Step – 1: Add a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) to your page, where you want to display the custom New Icon. I have used my document library landing page (AllItems.aspx) for this purpose.

Note:
This will show the custom New Icon for that particular page, place the CEWP to your master page if you want to apply custom icon for other pages which references the master page.

Step – 2: Open CEWP Tool Pane, click on “Source Editor”. Place the following script in Source Editor.

<script language="JavaScript">
_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("ShowCustomNewIcons");

function ShowCustomNewIcons()
{
//Custom New Icon Image path
var newIcon = '_layouts/images/icons/new1.jpg';
var fields,i;
fields = document.getElementsByTagName('IMG');
for( i = 0; i < fields.length; i ++ )
{
var imagesrc = fields[i].getAttribute('SRC');
if(imagesrc.indexOf("new.gif") != -1)
{
fields[i].src = newIcon;
}
}
}
</script>

Once the script added, you can see the custom icon will be shown on the new items instead of the OOB New Icon.

Using STSADM to set the duration of New Icon in SharePoint

2009-08-03T08:15:00.000-07:00

The duration of the New Icon can be modified using STSADM utility. Use “Days-to-show-new-icon” property to set the duration in days. If the duration is set to “0” (zero) then the new icon will not be displayed. This is the better way to hide the New Icon.

Note:
The default duration of days is “2”.

Using STSADM

Use the following STSADM command to set the New Icon display duration to “5” days.

stsadm.exe
-o setproperty
-pn days-to-show-new-icon
-pv 5
-url http://mosssiteUrl

TechNet Reference: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287681.aspx

My Fourth SharePoint Article in Codeproject.com

2009-08-01T21:29:00.000-07:00

My Fourth Article published in Codeproject.com

Title : SharePoint Tasks Popup using JavaScript API

Description :

This article uses SharePoint’s Content Editor Web part (CEWP) with Darren’s JavaScript API to display the tasks for current logged in user. JavaScript API is used to query the SharePoint Task list and the tasks for the current user will be displayed in the CEWP. See the screen below

Link : http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/SharePointTasksPopup.aspx

Audience Targeting for Quick Launch using CEWP in SharePoint

2009-07-30T08:29:00.000-07:00

I have seen this query in communities to hide the Quick Launch for a user group / particular audience. Most of the SharePoint developers know that Content Editor Web Part can be used to hide the Quick Launch bar.

To achieve the same, add the CEWP to the page, where you do not want to display the Quick Launch. Open Source Editor of CEWP and add the following

<style>
.ms-quicklaunch
{
display:none;
}
.ms-navframe
{
display: none;
}
</style>

Once the above <style> has been added, go to Advance Setting, set “Audience Targeting”. Set the group/audience to which you do not want to display the Quick Launch bar.

I have set the “Visitors” group in Audience Targeting. This setting will not allow the “Visitors” to see the Quick Launch bar.

I have a moss_user1 in Visitors Group and moss_user2 in Members Group.

The below screen hides the Quick Launch for moss_user1 (Visitors Group)

See the following screen, which shows the Quick Launch for moss_user2 (Members Group)

This approach will work for a single page, if you want the same to apply for all pages then add the CEWP to the master page with the above specified settings.

SharePoint Custom Search using FullTextSqlQuery – Format Hit Highlighted Summary

2009-07-30T03:27:00.001-07:00

SharePoint search uses “HitHighlightedSummary “column for highlighting the search text in result summary. Querying the HitHighlightedSummary column using FullTextSqlQuery returns the data that contains hit highlights that are surrounded with tags like <c0>…</c0>

This hit-highlight can be easily customized in OOB search core result web part by customizing the xsl. If it is a custom web part and using FullTextSqlQuery then we need to write piece of code to format hit-highlights.

public static string FormatHitHighlightedSummary(object text, string highlightedTag)
{
return Regex.Replace(Regex.Replace(text.ToString(), @"<c\d>", string.Format("<{0}>", highlightedTag), RegexOptions.IgnoreCase), @"</c\d>", string.Format("</{0}>", highlightedTag), RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
}

While binding the Highlighted Summary, use the above created method as shown below
<%# FormatHitHighlightedSummary(Eval("HitHighlightedSummary"), "i")%>

I’ve used “Italics - <i>” to Highlight the search text… Use this method to format highlighted summary depends on your requirement.

SharePoint Custom Page Layout – Web Parts getting added twice

2009-07-29T05:11:00.000-07:00

I have used SharePoint Designer to create a custom page layout and added few custom web parts (drag-drop using SPD).

The Page Layout has been deployed using a Feature. After deployment, The Page Layout has web parts as expected and the issue is, when a page is created using the custom Page Layout, each web part is added twice.

I have tried different approaches to remove the web parts unsuccessfully. Finally removed all web parts (which I have added using SharePoint Designer) and used “AllUsersWebPart” element to add custom web parts in Feature. It worked like a charm!

Useful Tools for SharePoint

2009-07-27T23:41:00.000-07:00

The following are the tools which are very frequently used in SharePoint Projects.

SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer is a WYSIWYG HTML editor and web design application from Microsoft exclusively for SharePoint sites.

Download link: http://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?FamilyID=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42&displaylang=en

U2U CAML Builder

A tool for creating and executing CAML queries

Download link: http://www.u2u.be/res/Tools/CamlQueryBuilder.aspx

SP Dispose Check

A tool for writing safe code using SharePoint Object Model to prevent memory leaks

Download link: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SPDisposeCheck

WSPBuilder

A tool for creating SharePoint Solution Package (WSP) WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007

Download link: http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder

STSDEV

A tool for creating easy deployable solution

Download link: http://www.codeplex.com/stsdev

SharePoint Manager 2007

It a SharePoint object model explorer tool, enables you to browse every site on the local farm and view every property.

Download link: http://www.codeplex.com/spm

WSS/MOSS Log file reader

A tool to View, search and filter SharePoint ULS log files directly from within Central Administration.

Download link: http://www.codeplex.com/wssmosslogfilereader

SharePoint Logging Spy

A tool to allow real time diagnostics of multiple servers in a SharePoint

Download link: http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointloggingspy

SharePoint Test Data Population Tool

A tool for capacity planning and performance testing that populates data for testing SharePoint deployments

Download link: http://www.codeplex.com/sptdatapop

AD Explorer

It is an advanced Active Directory (AD) viewer and editor which allows manipulation of AD objects

Download link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963907.aspx

IE Developer Toolbar

A tool that aims to aid in design and debugging of web pages

Download link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E59C3964-672D-4511-BB3E-2D5E1DB91038&displaylang=en

Note: “Internet Explorer 8” includes the features of IE Developer Toolbar built in, instead of a separate product; known as Developer Tools rather than Developer Toolbar.

Reflector

A tool for disassemble Assemblies

Download link: http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector

GhostDoc

A tool that helps developers writing XML documentation comments

Download link: http://www.roland-weigelt.de/ghostdoc

Resource Refactoring

A tool to extract hard coded strings from the code to resource files

Download link: http://www.codeplex.com/ResourceRefactoring

Fiddler

It is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet.

Download link: http://www.fiddlertool.com/

SharePoint Excel Services – Session Management

2009-03-28T09:33:00.000-07:00

A session will be generated whenever a user views a workbook in browser using Excel Services. The session settings for excel services can be configured in SSP. To configure these settings, navigate to SSP site and click on “Edit Excel Services Settings” from “Excel Services Settings” section.

The default session per user is 25. You can even use “STSADM” command line utility to configure the Excel Services Session management setting.

STSADM.EXE –o set-ecssessionmanagement –ssp mysharedservice
-maxsessionperuser 40

This will increase the session per user to 40.

Excel Web Access - Unable to Load Workbook

2009-03-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

The Excel web access will throw the following error when the associated workbook is created using Office Excel 2003 / lower.

Error:
The workbook that you selected cannot be opened.
The workbook may be in an unsupported file format, or it may be corrupt.

Use Office Excel 2007 to create the workbook and save it to your library (trusted location) and now the Excel Web Access web part will display the workbook.

Site Aggregator Web Part of SharePoint

2009-02-28T08:02:00.000-08:00

Site Aggregator is a simple and straight-forward web part, can be used to display sites (specific page in a site) of our choice.

The following are the important properties of Site Aggregator WebPart.

Properties of Site Aggregator

1. Number of characters before ellipses
Sets the number of characters that should be rendered in a tab before truncating and showing ellipses

Default value of this property is 30

2. Number of tabs to show before more dropdown
Sets the number of tabs that should be rendered before additional items are put in the more dropdown

Default value of this property is 5

3. URL
This URL fragment will be appended to the site URL when a tab is selected

Default value of this property is MyInfo.aspx (_layouts/MyInfo.aspx).

I have used “Site Content and Structure” page (_layouts/sitemanager.aspx) page. This will help managers to easily navigate and review “Pending Approvals” or other task of all sites from a same page.

Add the “Site Aggregator” to your page and set the Target Audience property to Managers or the respective approver group, so that only managers/approvers can see this web part.

Use “New Site Tab” from Sites menu to create a new Site Tab.

Set the URL property to “_layouts/sitemanager.aspx”. See the below image for the properties of Site Aggregator.

After adding all the sites, select the “Pending Approval” view to see all the approvals which are pending for the selected site.

Managers / Approvers can manage all approvals or view other details in same page.

Customizing SharePoint Blog Posts Web Part

2009-02-21T08:45:00.000-08:00

Description

The OOTB posts web part displays complete posts in Home Page (default.aspx) of Blog Site. In this post, the Posts web part is customized to display only 250 characters from each post and a “more” link to the actual blog post instead of displaying complete Blog post in Home Page.

Before Customization

The Posts “ListViewWebPart” displays complete posts in home page.

After Customization

See the below screen, after the customization of Posts Web Part using SharePoint Designer.

Approach

Below the approach followed to display 250 characters blog post summary.

1) Convert Posts web part to XSD Data View using SharePoint Designer (SPD)
2) customize the XSL to display 250 characters summary and a “more” link to the actual blog post
3) Create a new Web Part from Customized Post web part and use it in other blog site

The following explains in-detail about the approach.

Creating XSD Data View

Use SharePoint Designer to convert the default list view web part (Posts) to XSD Data View. Open the Blog’s Home Page in your SharePoint Designer. Once the page is opened Right Click the List View Posts web part and select “Convert to XSD Data View”. See the below screen.

Customizing the XSD Data View

The Body column of the Posts list holds the complete summary text. The DataFormWebPart generated by SPD points the list by using the ListID. ListID is nothing but the GUID, which will change server to server. so use ListName instead of ListID to use this web part in blog site of any server.

Parameters Generated by SPD

After Change

The “removeHtmlTags” template of XSL used to strip the HTML text from the summary text. See the below screens which shows the XSL customizations.

“removeHtmlTags” Template Definition

Call “removeHtmlTags” for getting Pure Text

Replace the following section

Now the customizations have been done. Export posts web part and use it in other Blog sites by uploading it to Web Part Gallery.

Reference:
Stripping HTML
http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/05/18/stripping-html-tags-when-using-xslt.aspx

Scheduling Periodic/Delayed SharePoint-STSADM Backup using Windows Task Scheduler

2009-02-17T07:51:00.000-08:00

STSADM can be used effectively with Windows Task Scheduler to schedule periodic/delayed backups.

STSADM

STSADM is the powerful built-in command line tool to backup/restore a SharePoint server farm or web application or site collection or a database. This tool has very simple, faster and easy to use commands for backup/restore SharePoint data.

STSADM backup syntax

For site collection backup

stsadm -o backup
-url
-filename
[-overwrite]

For catastrophic backup

stsadm -o backup
-directory
-backupmethod
[-item]
[-percentage]
[-backupthreads]
[-showtree]
[-quiet]

Please refer the following to get more details about the backup syntax
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263441.aspx

Locking Site

Backup process will take longer time for large site collections. If any changes made to the site collection during the backup process, the backup can become corrupted. The preferred approach would be locking the site collection using Setsitelock command of STSADM till the backup process complete. Once the backup process completes, reset the site collection to its default state.

Please refer the following for more information on Setsitelock
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262811.aspx

To get the current access level of the site
stsadm -o getsitelock -url <URL of Site Collection>

To lock the site/changing the site to read-only.
stsadm -o setsitelock -url <URL of Site Collection> -lock readonly

The following steps needs to be done for scheduling a periodic/delayed backup.

Batch File

Create a batch file, use Notepad to enter the below script and save as “Backup_Script.bat”.
This script creates daily backup of a site collection. A new backup file will be created each day and the file name is auto generated concatenating the current system date.

The script does the following

1) Determine the lock status
2) Locks the site collection
3) Creates a file name using current date
4) Creates backup
5) Unlock the site collection

Backup Script

@echo off
@echo --------------------------------------------------------
@echo backing up site collection <URL of Site Collection>
@echo --------------------------------------------------------
cd \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN
@echo locking site collection before the backup process starts
@echo off
stsadm -o getsitelock -url <URL of Site Collection>
stsadm -o setsitelock -url <URL of Site Collection> -lock readonly
@echo Site locked

@Echo Generating File Name using current date
@For /F "tokens=1,2,3 delims=/ " %%A in ('Date /t') do @(
Set Day=%%A
Set Month=%%B
Set Year=%%C
Set All=%%C%%B%%A
)

@echo off
stsadm -o backup -url <URL of Site Collection> -filename "C:\Backup\Backup_%All%.bak"
@echo backup completed
@echo off
stsadm -o setsitelock -url <URL of Site Collection> -lock none
@echo Site lock removed

Note: Replace “<URL of Site Collection>” with your site collection URL. Also I’ve used a folder named “C:\Backup” change it to your respective folder.Windows Scheduled Tasks

Create a new Windows Scheduled Task by navigating Start -> Control Panel -> Scheduled Tasks -> Add Scheduled Task. The following screen shows the Windows Scheduled Task Wizard.

Click the Browse button and select the backup batch file (Backup_Script.bat). Click on Next to schedule the backup. The screen below shows the available options for scheduling a task.

Select the convenient time to take the backup. It is better to choose low traffic hours for backing up a site.

Once the time schedule has been selected, click on Next and supply the credentials to run the task.

The account which is used for executing the task should have the Administrative permission. Click Finish to complete the wizard. Now a daily backup has been scheduled, the Task Scheduler will execute the batch file daily at specified time.

Site templates not available in SharePoint Publishing Site

2009-01-10T04:40:00.000-08:00

Many of us would have seen this question in communities. When you create a sub-site from publishing root site, by default the site template list will show “Publishing site with workflow” template.

It doesn’t mean that you can create only publishing site within a publishing root site. To add other site templates, navigate to Site Actions --> Site Settings --> Modify All Site Settings. Click on “Page layouts and site templates” from “Look and Feel” section.

Add whatever site templates you are interested in to create sub-sites from publishing site. I have added a “Blog” template.

Now navigate to Site Actions --> Site Settings --> Create Site, notice that the newly added site template is available for you.

Hope this will be helpful to someone.

Programmatically adding web part to a SharePoint page from web part gallery

2009-01-02T21:40:00.000-08:00

I had a requirement to add a web part to default.aspx page from Web part gallery. I have used a Feature to do the same. Please find the code below which is written in “Feature Activated” event.

Feature Activated

Add WebPart

Get WebPart XML

Hope the code is straightforward to understand.

SharePoint Feature to add site columns

2009-01-01T04:49:00.000-08:00

This post explains adding new site column to a SharePoint site. The following simple steps needs to be done to add site columns to a site collection.

1) Identify the Fields (Site Columns), type and its properties. Each Field will have properties like ID(GUID), Display Name, Required, etc.

2) Create a XML file for adding the column information. Ex. “SiteColumns.xml” - This file holds the metadata information related to site columns (Fields). This file information used in
<ElementManifests> section of FEATURE.xml.

3) Create a FEATURE to add these site columns to a site collection.
See the following sample screens to get the better understanding

SiteColumns.xml

<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<Field Type="HTML"
DisplayName="About"
RichText="TRUE"
RichTextMode="FullHtml"
Required="FALSE"
Group="Custom Column"
ID="{246C6CAE-D801-11DD-A840-DC8E55D89593}"
StaticName="About"
Name="About" />

<Field Type="Image"
DisplayName="AboutImage"
RichText="TRUE"
RichTextMode="FullHtml"
Required="FALSE"
Group="Custom Column"
ID="{304952EE-D801-11DD-9B55-0C8F55D89593}"
StaticName="AboutImage"
Name="AboutImage" />
</Elements>

FEATURE.xml

<Feature Id="873CDC1A-D801-11DD-B399-959255D89593"
Title="Add Site Columns Feature"
Description="This Feature adds Site Columns"
Scope="Site"
Hidden="False"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<ElementManifests>
<ElementManifest Location="SiteColumns.xml"/>
</ElementManifests>
</Feature>

This post will also be helpful for the newbie’s to understand about Feature in SharePoint.

Code to remove Web part from a page in SharePoint

2008-12-05T06:45:00.000-08:00

Here the code snippet to remove Web Part from Web part zone of default.aspx page.

The SPLimitedWebPartManager provides a limited set of Web Part operations that can be performed in our object model.

Code snippet to get all installed languages from sharepoint server Farm

2008-09-19T07:57:00.000-07:00

I had a requirement to display all installed languages of a SharePoint server farm in a DropDownList.

Regional Settings of SPWeb has a property named "SPWeb.RegionalSettings.InstalledLanguages", which returns language collection of type
"SPLanguageCollection". The following are the properties of "SPLanguage" instance.

Use the "Display Name" property to get the language display name ex. English and "LCID" property to get the locale ID ex. 1033(for English).
See the below code snippet, which will be used to get the installed languages from a SharePoint server farm.

Hope this will be helpful

Programmatically uploading site templates to site template gallery

2008-07-17T02:49:00.000-07:00

I had a requirement to upload site templates to site collection’s site template gallery using SharePoint object model. See the code snippet below, which will be helpful to upload site templates to site template gallery.

This code uses a configuration file, which has a custom section called “SiteTemplatesSection”. This custom section holds the physical path of each site template.

Programmatically Creating Site Collection in SharePoint

2008-07-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

It is possible to create site collections programmatically. The Site Collection creation can be accomplished in the following ways

1) Using SharePoint Object Model
2) Using Central Admin’s Admin Web Service

Creation Site Collection using SharePoint Object Model

See the following code snippet, which uses SharePoint Object Model to create site collection.

Creating Site Collection using Admin Web Service

The Admin Web Service of Central Admin has the following web methods

The following code snippet uses “CreateSite” web method to create a site collection.

After the successful creation of site collection, this web method returns the URL of the newly created site.

Programmatically adding data to SharePoint List’s Choice column

2008-05-29T08:55:00.000-07:00

SharePoint has a column type called “CHOICE”. This column will be useful for presenting one of the field from the following

Dropdown List
Radio Buttons
Check Boxes (To Select Multiple Items)

Consider I’ve a list “Resource List” with following columns

Column Name ------ Type
Resource Name --> Single Line of Text
Languages Known --> Choice (C#, VB.NET, Java, C, C++) – Multiselect

“Languages Known” is the CHOICE field (Check Boxes), to select multiple languages known by the resource.When adding new items to the Resouce List, notice that multiple items selected for the ‘Languages Known’ CHOICE column will be seperated by semi colan(‘;’).

I had a requirement to add the list item by code. I have used “ChoiceA;ChoiceB;..ChoiceN” for storing the ListItem’s multi-select CHOICE field. After adding ListItem by code, I have Edited the newly added item in the browser, but no check box has been selected for the item which was added by code.

Then after a little effort I found that the multi-select CHOICE data is stored as “;#ChoiceA;#ChoiceB;#...;#”
See the below code for adding listitem to Resource List.

Below screen shows the newly added Item in the edit mode

Page Hit Counter in SharePoint

2008-04-04T09:52:00.000-07:00

You would have seen many sites displaying page hit counters. To display this in SharePoint page, insert the “Hit Counter” web component from SharePoint Designer.

Open your site or your sites Master page to insert this component. For the demonstration purpose, I’ve use my default.aspx to insert the “Hit Counter” component. Once the page is opened in SharePoint Designer, place the cursor where you want to insert the hit counter. Go to Insert --> Web Component.

Click on the Web Component, this will display the available web components. You can find different types of other components readily available.

Click on the Hit Counter component, this will display different counter styles. Select any one style from the list. I have selected the below marked style.

Click on “Finish”, this will open the below Hit Counter Properties window.

You can even create your own Hit Counter. Use “Reset counter to” to reset the counter from a given number. To display fixed number of digits use “Fixed number of digits” property. Click on “Ok”, the hit counter will be inserted to your page. The below code will be inserted in your page to display the counter.

Now, preview your page from SharePoint Designer / a Web browser. You can see the Hit Counter incremented for each hit.

You can see the Hit Counter increments for each hit.

Creating SharePoint List using Office Excel

2008-03-04T07:19:00.000-08:00

I had a requirement to create SharePoint lists using Excel sheet data. Luckily I notice that there is an option in Office Excel to create SharePoint list using excel data. Below screen shows the “Employee” data. I have used Office Excel 2003 for publishing excel list to SharePoint.

To create a SharePoint list, select the excel data then go to Data --> List --> Create List. This will create a List in Excel. If you are using Office Excel 2007 then use this reference.

Select the created list in Excel sheet and go to Data --> List --> Publish List. This will brings up a popup for publishing the created list to a SharePoint site.

Use this popup to input information like “Address” of the site, provide list a name and Description.

Click on Next, This will brings up the column and associated data type information. To publish excel data to a SharePoint list, Excel force columns to use certain types.

Click Finish to publish list to SharePoint.

Now, open the published site and add the newly created “Employee” list to the page. Below screen shows the Employee List which is created from Office Excel.

This approach will help to create SharePoint list from Office Excel with minimal effort.

Windows UI for STSADM

2008-02-07T04:18:00.000-08:00

Those who have used SharePoint for developing applications, they might have used STSADM executable. Here is an interesting utility that gives a UI for STSADM. This utility is developed as a windows application. It has a dropdown that displays all the STSADM options. Once a specific option is selected from the dropdown, it displays textboxes for various parameters.

See this post to download, to know more about STSADMWin utility.

Displaying Pdf document in SharePoint Page

2008-01-18T02:29:00.000-08:00

Pdf documents can be displayed in SharePoint site with the use of “Content Editor Web part”. To know more about "Content Editor Web part", I suggest you to read this post, where you will get to know about playing a video in SharePoint site.

Add a “Content Editor Web part” to your SharePoint page, Click on the “Open the Tool Pane”, click on “Source Editor” to place the HTML source.
Place the following piece of code in to the Source Editor

In the above code, “src” points to a source location, the location can be a HTTP or a UNC path. I’ve stored my Pdf document in my document library and used the Http location of my Pdf file. Also Set the Height and Width properties and click on “Ok”.

The above image shows the embedded Pdf document to a SharePoint page.

Calculated column to display month name from a date

2008-01-16T03:05:00.000-08:00

I was haing a requirement to display the month name from the selected date like January, February etc. I have created a calculated column and used a formula to display the month name.

Create a custom SharePoint list and a date column, a calculated column to it and other columns to it. For the demonstration purpose, I have created a list “Employee List”, with “Emp ID”, “Employee Name”, “Joining Date”, and “Month Calculated” columns. Here “Month Calculated” is the Calculated Column.

Above image shows the column details of "Employee List".

In the Calculated Column, use the following formula to get the month name from the “Joining Date” column.

=TEXT([Joining Date],"MMMM") -- To Display “January”, “February”, etc
Or
=TEXT([Joining Date],"MMM") -- To Display “Jan”, “Feb”, etc

Above image shows the “Month Calculated” calculated column.

Once the columns added to the List, Add new items by clicking “New”.

After selecting the “Joining Date” Click ok. Now the calculated column will display the month name for the selected “Joining Date”.

Registering Assembly to GAC via Code

2008-01-07T02:55:00.000-08:00

Registering Assembly to GAC via Code

As we know to register an assembly toGlobal Assembly Cache, the assembly must be strong named. This strong name is used to prevent spoofing of your code. Use the “gacutil.exe” to install the assembly to the GAC.

Example

gacutil /i MyAssembly.dll

The above command will installs the “MyAssembly.dll” in to the GAC.
See the following code snippet to do the above stuff by C# code.

try
{
string assemblyName = “MyAssembly.dll”;

ProcessStartInfo pStartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo();

//specify gacutil.exe whith which to start the process
pStartInfo.FileName = "gacutil.exe";
pStartInfo.Arguments = string.Format("/i {0}", assemblyName);
pStartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;

//start the process
Process process = Process.Start(pStartInfo);

//wait till the process completes
process.WaitForExit();
}
catch (Exception e)
{
MessageBox.Show(string.Format("Error registering the assembly :
'{0}'.\n{1}", assemblyName, e.Message),
"GAC Installation Error");
}

The “UseShellExecute” property indicates whether to use the operating system shell to start the process. The default is “true”. Set this property to “false” – The process is created directly from the executable file.

Using XSL to display XML data into a human-readable format

2007-12-28T00:40:00.000-08:00

Abstract

When we open our XML document on browser, we will notice only the elements of that XML document. If we want to display our XML data in a table like format then we need to know about XSL.

HTML

HTML contains the predefined tags like <TABLE>, <H1>, etc. This will be well understood by the browser. And the browser also knows how to display these tags.

XML & XSL

The most recent version of XSLT is XSLT 2.0.

XML does not use any predefined tags i.e., we can use any tag-name we like. And these names are not well understood. The browser doesn’t know how to display these tags. Now the XSL plays its role, it stands for “Extensible Stylesheet Language”, which describes how the XML document should be displayed on the browser.Have a look at the following XML Document, which describes about Employees. It contains reference to the XSL file (Employee.xsl).

Employee.xml:

Now we need to create a XSL file, by name “Employee.xsl”.

Employee.xsl:

In the above code, xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" points to the official W3C XSLT namespace. The is used to build a template, and match attribute is used to associate a template with an XML element. Use “/” to associate the whole XML document.

which associates the whole XML document to the template. The used to select every XML element of a specified node-set: in our example “Employees/Employee”. The used to extract the value of an XML element. It is a simple XSL style sheet, there are other elements of XSL (if, choose, sort…), which are also very useful for transformation.Now the browser will nicely transform the XML document to XHTML.Open the “Employee.xml” in your browser.

XML data will be displayed in a table format. XSL also used to transform XML documents into some other formats.

Silverlight Slide Show in SharePoint Page

2007-12-20T02:28:00.000-08:00

It is very easy to display Silverlight powered slide show in SharePoint using Slide.Show. Vertigo Software has released this full-featured interactive open source Silverlight 1.0 control for publishing photo slides on the web.

Download Slide.Show from Codeplex.

I have used this Slide.Show to display silverlight powered slide show in my SharePoint page.

I have created a basic html page to display this Silverlight powered slide show and used a “Page Viewer WebPart” to display the slide show in my home page. You can refer this Quick Start Guide for configuration.

Created a folder in my document library to store HTML and other files and also created two xml files Configuration.xml and Data.xml in the same location.

Use Data.xml to create albums and slides. I have used an Image Library to display these images. You can see buttons for displaying the Album list and also to display the slides in full screen.

Slide.Show supports 300 configurable options. Now it is very easy to play with Silverlight with the use of Slide.Show.

Creating Wiki Site in SharePoint

2007-12-14T22:14:00.000-08:00

A Wiki site is a collection of web pages, which allows users to easily add or edit content on the web. Wiki site contains collaboration of works from different authors. It is very easy and straightforward to create a Wiki site in SharePoint.

Creating Wiki Site

Create a site in SharePoint using the “Wiki Site” template from the Collaboration tab. To do this, go to Site Actions --> Create --> Sites and Workspaces. Fill Title, Description, and URL name input boxes and select the “Wiki Site” template.

Once the Create button is clicked, it will create a Wiki site with default pages in it. The Home page will contains the welcome message and some information about the Wiki and also it contains details about how Wiki used in business environment.

A new “Wiki pages” library will be created when you create a Wiki site. It also contains one more page by name “How to use this wiki site”. This page has the detailed description about the creation and management of Wiki pages.

The Wiki site provides WYSWYG (what you see is what you get) editing. Use the Edit button at the top of the page to edit the page. You will get the entire “Rich Text box” editing features to format the text.

To link to another page in this Wiki site, enclose the name of the site in double brackets on the edit form.

Ex: [[MOSS]] --> this will link to the page moss page.

Use the pipe “” symbol after the page name to display the link in some other text than the page name.

Ex: [[SPDesignerSharepoint Designer]]

Now, click the Edit button at the top of the Home page.

I have given links to two pages namely “MOSS” and “SPDesigner”, and note I’ve used “” to display the page SPDesigner as “Sharepoint Designer”. After adding the above text, click “OK” button, this will bring the below page.

The two sites “MOSS” and “Sharepoint Designer” are underlined, which shows these pages are not exist. Click on the MOSS link, this will create a new Wiki page by name “MOSS” in edit mode.

Add some more information to this “MOSS” page. I have added one more link in this page to go back to home page. Create “SPDesigner” page as we created “MOSS” page.

There are some other options “History” and “Incoming Links” available at the top of the page.

History

Use History to restore a previous version of a page. Each page will contains version history. If you need to restore to previous version, click History at the top of the page.

As shown in the above image, select the version which you want to restore and click “Restore this version” in the top toolbar.

Incoming Links

This will display the page which links to the current page.

These are the pages “MOSS” and “SPDesigner” has the links to the “Home” page.

Displaying charts in SharePoint using Excel Services

2007-12-12T01:41:00.000-08:00

A chart displays data in a visually appealing way. By using charts, it is very easy to understand and compare data. We can use Office Excel 2007 for creating charts and Excel Services of MOSS to display it in SharePoint.

Excel Services

Excel Services is part of MOSS 2007. Excel Services has a server-side engine for loading Excel spreadsheets, calculating formulas and rendering their output as wide-reach HTML targeting the browser.

Open the Central Admin--> Operations --> Services on Server then Start the Excel Calculation Service on the server if it is stopped.

Excel Web Access

Excel Web Access is a webpart that displays data and charts from excel workbook. It has similar look like office excel workbook.

Creating a Document Library

Create a Document Library in your MOSS Site. Go to Site Actions --> Create --> Document Library to create document library in your SharePoint Site. This document library will be useful to publish our Excel spread sheets.

Trusted File Location

Excel Services opens Excel workbooks that are stored in trusted file locations only. Trusted File location is a SharePoint Document Library, a UNC path, or an HTTP site that is configured as trusted repository for excel workbooks.

Add this newly created excel document library as a trusted file location for storing excel workbooks. To do this, open the Shared Services Administration Site then click the “Trusted File Locations” link from Excel Services Settings. Now, click “Add Trusted File Location” and add our document library as a trusted location.

Creating Charts Using Office Excel 2007

We can use Office Excel 2007 for creating different kinds of charts like Column, Pie, Bar, Area, Scatter etc. See the following image which shows the different chart types available with Office Excel 2007.

In this sample, I’m going to create a Column Chart by using following sample data.

To create Column Chart select the data and Click on Insert-->Column (Chart) and select your desired chart. See the following screen, I’ve selected Clustered cylinder.

The below chart will be created once the chart type (Clustered Cylinder) is selected. And this chart will be named as “Chart 1”.

We are going to use Excel Web Access Webpart to display this particular Chart. It is also possible to display the Entire Workbook. Once the chart has been created, publish this workbook to the document library. From the Office menu click Publish-->Excel Services as shown in below image

Click on that Excel Services, this will open a “Save As” popup dialog and enter the Document Library path to save this file the Library.

“Open in Excel Services” – Once the form is saved, Excel Services will open the excel workbook in a new browser.

We can add some more options like showing only selected sheets, named items, or adding parameters, etc., with the use of “Excel Services Options”. See the below image which shows the Excel Services Options.

These are the different options available, here we can select the Entire Workbook, only selected sheets or any named item. In our sample, we are going to display only a Chart. Select the “Items in the Workbook”, this will show a list of named items, in our case we have only one item “Chart 1”. Check “Chart 1” from the list. Click “Ok” and save the excel workbook to the Document Library.

There is one more tab “Parameters” which can be used to pass parameters to excel services. Excel Services will create UI by using InfoPath at run time to get input for those parameters.

Now, Open your SharePoint site and add the “Excel Web Access WebPart” to your page.
If this WebPart is not in your list then activate the “Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Features” feature.

Once the WebPart is added to the page, Open the Tool pane, this tool pane contains different properties that will be helpful to display the workbook, part of workbook or an item in a workbook.

Browse and select the Workbook from the document library, enter “Chart 1” in Named Item property and enter other properties like rows, columns etc. Now, click ok, Excel services will render the chart. If the published workbook contains parameters then an InfoPath form will be displayed along with the chart. InfoPath form will be used to get input and the calculation service of excel will perform the calculation in server and render the results back to the browser.

It is also possible to use Excel Web Services (EWS) hosted in SharePoint that provides several methods that can be used as an API to build custom applications based on Excel workbook.

Displaying Custom Icon in Document Library

2007-11-29T01:45:00.000-08:00

It’s easy to display custom icon for documents in the Document Library. By default if a file extension is not know to SharePoint (doesn’t has an entry in DOCICON.xml) then it will display a default icon “ICGEN.GIF”.

Instead of displaying the Default Icon in the document library, I want to display a custom icon. To do this, we should know about “DOCICON.xml” file. This file resides in “Local_Drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML “. This file defines mapping between each file extension and its icon.

You can even define your own file extension and associate a custom icon to that file extension. It is also possible to change already defined icons. Changes to the “DOCICON.xml” will affect all site definitions under the front-end web server. So the changes should be made with extreme caution.

See the below document library which displays a default icon.

To change the default icon to a custom icon

1) Create a 16x16 icon in “Local_Drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft
Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES” location

2) Take a copy of “DOCICON.xml” – Take a backup of this file

3) Open “DOCICON.xml” and navgaete to the “Default” node and replace the “icgen.gif”
by your custom icon name.

4) Reset IIS.

Now you can see the default icon is replaced by the custom icon.

Publishing InfoPath Form

2007-11-26T23:08:00.000-08:00

InfoPath form services will throw an error if the InfoPath form template is not properly published. Follow these steps to publish an InfoPath form (.xsn) and use this template in Form Services of MOSS 2007.

Create an InfoPath form and add Business logic to it (If any).

Open Your Project (InfoPath) in Visual Studio. Open Tools à Form Options

In this “Form Options” Dialog, some properties need to be set.

1) Security and Trust

--> Select Full Trust (Browser enabled forms must have the “Full Trust” Security level.

--> Check Sign this form template (Create a new certificate by clicking “Create Certificate”.

2) Compatibility

Check the “Design a form template that can be opened in a browser or InfoPath” in Browser Compatibility section. Enter the SharePoint site URL to verify the compatibility.

After setting these properties click “Ok”. Check the “Design Checker”, it should not have errors.

Now go to Build à Publish in Visual Studio. This will open the below dialog.

Here, publish this InfoPath form to a network location. In my case I’ve published in C:\MySampleInfoPathForm.xsn

Click next and Publish to your network location. An “.xsn” file will be created which will have all the business logic in it. (No need to copy the business logic dll’s to server).

Now, Open the SharePoint Central Admin Site.

Go to “Application Management” --> Manage Form Templates

This will take us the following page

Click on Upload form template

Select your “.xsn” and click ‘Verify”. This will show a success message if the form is trusted. Otherwise, it will throw an error.

After the Verification click the Upload button to upload the InfoPath form as an Administrator approved template.

After successful upload, activate the form to your site collection. See the below screen

We are going to use this template as “Content Type” for a document library.

Go to that site, which you have activated this template. Create a Document Library.
Go to Settings of the Document Library.

Settings --> Advanced Settings

1) Select “Allow Management of Content type” to Yes. (Default it is set to false)
2) Select “Display as a Web page” then click OK.

Now, In Document Library Settings page click on “Add from existing content type”

Select your content type (see the below screen)

Click on Add then OK. Now this Content type (MySampleInfopathForm) has been added to the Document Library.

Click that Content type; InfoPath Form Services will display the InfoPath form in a browser.

Inline Video in SharePoint

2007-11-19T23:05:00.000-08:00

Abstract

This article provides the information to add inline video to a SharePoint Site. We can achieve this by using Built-in “Content Editor WebPart”.

Content Editor WebPart

Content Editor Web Part is intended for adding HTML content to a Web Part Page, which may include hyperlinks.

It is possible to add content to the Content Editor WebPart in three ways

Rich Text Editor:

Use the Rich Text Editor to create the formatted content without the prior knowledge of HTML.
There are different toolbars available in this editor to format the content.

Source Editor:

Use this Source Editor to add or modify the HTML source code. This Source Editor is a plain text editor and it is intended for users who are familiar with HTML syntax.

Content Link:

Use this Content Link to link to the existing content by entering a hyperlink to a text file that contains a HTML source code. HTTP or HTTPS are the two valid hyperlink protocols that you can use to link to the file.

The Following image shows the Content Editor Tool Pane.

Adding a Video File To SharePoint Site

It is Simple and straight forward to add a video file. Add a Video file to your library or to a location, which can be accessed by an UNC path. Content Editor WebPart uses this source location to display the video.

In this following scenario I’ve a document library “Sample Documents”, which I’ve used to store my sample video clip.

Here, “My Sample Video” is the video file, which has been uploaded to my document library “Sample Documents”.

Now, Add Content Editor WebPart to your page. In this webpart we are going to add few lines of HTML source to embed the video file “My Sample Video”.

HTML Source

Details about the properties of embed tag.

src – source location

autoplay – If autoplay set to true, the video will be played immediately upon opening the SharePoint site. If this is set to false, the user has to manually click play to play the video.

loop – If loop is set to true, the video will be played over again after the end. If this is set to false, only once the video will be played.

height, width – you can use these properties to adjust the height and width respectively. Next, Get the location of your video. To get this location, go to your library and right click the video file. Copy Shortcut will give the location of your file. Now place the location in src of embed tag.– If autoplay set to true, the video will be played immediately upon opening the SharePoint site. If this is set to false, the user has to manually click play to play the video.

loop – If loop is set to true, the video will be played over again after the end. If this is set to false, only once the video will be played.

height, width – you can use these properties to adjust the height and width respectively. Next, Get the location of your video. To get this location, go to your library and right click the video file. Copy Shortcut will give the location of your file. Now place the location in src of embed tag.

Once the above HTML source code is entered in to source editor, click on save button, this will embed the video in to your page.

With the help of Content Editor Webpart it is very easy to play the inline video in a SharePoint site.

FormState in InfoPath 2007

2007-06-12T21:08:00.000-07:00

Introduction

This Article is about the FormState of InfoPath 2007.

InfoPath 2007 has the new property called “FormState”, this could be used to store the state values. In previous version of InfoPath, to store the state values, you would have used hidden variables. This property will reduce or avoid the use of hidden variables.

About FormState

FormState is an IDictionary object, which holds the user-defined state values, which were defined in the variable declaration section i.e., before the InternalStartup() of FormCode class.

Using FormState, user-defined state variables can be accessed from code running in forms opened in Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 or in a Web browser. It is also possible to store the state value in global member variable only when you use InfoPath client, but this will not work in Web browser. Design Checker of InfoPath will throw an error to use the FormState instead of global member variables.

Example

Following example shows the design pattern for creating the user defined state variable in declaration section of FormCode class.

///

/// Get or Set Count
///

private int count
{
get
{
// If the state variable “count” is not initialized then
// return 0; return the count otherwise.
if (FormState["_count"] != null)
{
return (int)FormState["_count"];
}
else
{
return 0;
}
}
set
{
FormState["_count"] = value;
}
}

In the above example, “count” is a private property, which can be accessed only within the FormCode class. FormState holds the values as “Key, Value” pair, here the Key is _count. If the _count is not initialized, zero will be returned; otherwise the value stored in the _count will be returned.

It is also possible to store different types of objects in FormState. For example, I have a list of holidays for a particular location, which is in the Holiday Table in the database. I have to use this list in different methods in my FormCode class and also each time I do not want to fetch this list from database.

For the above scenario, we can create a HashTable (which is also inherited from IDictionary) to store the holiday list from the database in the Load event of the Form. Store this in the FormState Dictionary.

///

/// Get or Set the Holiday List
///

private Hashtable holidayList
{
get
{
return (Hashtable)FormState["_holidayList"];
}
set
{
FormState["_holidayList"] = value;
}
}

Now, this property “holidayList” can be used in different methods in the FormCode class.

Conclusion

FormState will be very useful to store the user-defined state data and access the same in InfoPath 2007 and also in Web browser.