Another aggregated set of SharePoint Tips, from 11 to 20

• SharePoint Tip #20. Do you know “about Site Objects limitations in size”?
• SharePoint Tip #19. Do you know “when to use Web Services and when API”?
• SharePoint Tip #18. Do you know “why to use dedicated Web Server for crawling”?
• SharePoint Tip #17. Do you know “why to measure network latency of SharePoint Farm”?
• SharePoint Tip #16. Do you know “how to get the SharePoint version programmatically”?
• SharePoint Tip #15. Do you know “that users in SharePoint groups affect crawling performance”?
• SharePoint Tip #14. Do you know “how fast profiles are imported”?
• SharePoint Tip #13. Do you know “that people picker selects disable account by default”?
• SharePoint Tip #12. Do you know “that you can reset app pool instead of IIS to clean the cache”?
• SharePoint Tip #11. Do you know “difference in disconnected solutions for SharePoint”?

Previous 10 are published there

This month I’m reading my first SharePoint presentation in Sydney (Australia), so I welcome NSW ppl to come to listen to me and to criticize a bit :)

I’m planning to run about 3 presentations of “best practices” for SharePoint infrastructure and Development, so this one starts with the basis of how to create the SharePoint farm

Detail info below    

Topics are:

PowerPoint presentation is available to download in PDF format

The aggregated post of the first 10 posts from the “Do you know” SharePoint Tips series

• SharePoint Tip #10. Do you know “how to delete [Title] column from List Library”?
• SharePoint Tip #9. Do you know “when server name is used in account pattern of a new web application”?
• SharePoint Tip #8. Do you know “why installing SharePoint on virtualized Windows 2008 DC is wrong idea”?
• SharePoint Tip #6. Do you know “how to find stsadm command you forgot”?
• SharePoint Tip #5. Do you know “that Web App permissions override Site level ones”?
• SharePoint Tip #4. Do you know “why Alternative Access Mapping (AAM) is necessary”?
• SharePoint Tip #3. Do you know “that Visual Studio Extension can be installed on XP/Vista”
• SharePoint Tip #2. Do you know “why OOTB Roles must be customized”?
• SharePoint Tip #1. Do you know “what happens behind the scene when you create new Web App?”

In this post I’d like to review existed tools for the SharePoint management. The idea to create this overview appeared after I read that Bamboo solution shipped their own SharePoint analyzer. The first I thought was - “Why do we need another tool, if we already have SharePointSpy and SharePointManager?!”

So, let’s start comparing of three tools, which exist on market

1) SharePoint Analyzer from Bamboo Solutions

2) SharePoint Manager from CodePlex

3) SharePointSpy from EchoTechnology

and how those tools functionality differs.

Results: analyzing those tools I found that SharePoint Analyzer and SharePoint Manager provide you the richest functionality to manage your SharePoint environment. I can’t name the best tool, because those tools have different target audience and must be used together.

SharePoint Analyzer from Bamboo solutions provides rich and good, structured overview of your SharePoint farm for administrator/infrastructure perspective – detailed info about servers, web applications, logs, and etc. Good usability, grouping and detailed information across all your farm servers, but there are few useful info for developers.

SharePointSpy is absolutely different tool – it stays away from infrastructure, providing your deep info about sites, features, site definitions and etc., allowing your to export different schemas xml. Really powerful tool for developers, who need deep dive inside SharePoint stuff.

SharePoint Manager locates between administrator vs developer poles. It provides you almost the same functionality as SharePointSpy, but has a lot of information for infrastructure guys/administrators as well.

My choice: combination of SharePoint Analyzer for maintenance and SharePoint Manager for development. But, if those three tools were shareware, then I’d chose SharePoint manager for its balance between admin and developer functionality.

Mirror: SharePoint Managers Tools overview

I’ve seen several cases, when people use CQWP and surprises when it doesn’t return all items in standard mode and returns all necessary items in “edit” mode. I find this topic is not being documented enough anywhere.

So, CQWP ignores following items from your queried data:

1. Items are checked-out
2. Items are not published and not-approved

Those scenarios are “behaviour by design”, and I found such behaviour logical. User’s are working on their items, and work in progress – you shouldn’t show such items

Workaround: set “UseCache” property to “false”.

Cite from SharePoint team:

“You are only seeing your items in edit mode because the caching infrastructure of the CQWP does not cache checked-out items of individual users and we disable cache in edit mode.  You can disable caching on your Web Part by setting the "UseCache" property to false”

So, my recommendation is to revise your approach to return published and checked-in stuff only.

Mirror: Why Content Query Web Part (CQWP) doesn’t return all results.

In these days I was working on the search issue in SharePoint 2007, which led me to the interesting behaviour of BDC Permissions.

We had the following errors in MOSS crawl log

bdc2://<guid>
The parameter is incorrect. (Could not create a security identifier for the identity '<domain>\<user.name>. This identity may have been deleted.)

What it means, is that search can’t crawl BDC content, because owner of the BDC application was removed.

Diagnosing this issue we found that user who imported BDC application doesn’t work at us anymore, and he was removed from Active Directory. So, that’s why BDC not accessible.

You can find the full descriptions of this behaviour there http://k2distillery.blogspot.com/2008/06/bdc-crawl-missing-security-identifier.html

So, the workaround promised be simple – just “Manage Permissions” for this BDC application, removing user from list of BDC Entry owners and from BDC Catalog Permissions. That’s what described in that article. But reality is far from it :)

The actual behaviour is whenever you navigate to “Manage Permissions” you got “Error: Access Denied" screen. The surprising part of this is that my user is

• Farm Administrator
• SSP Site Owner and SSP administrator
• have all rights in SSP Personalization Permissions
• have all rights in BDC Catalog Permissions

Well, I have all permissions, but I still can’t access user’s BDC application.

I didn’t know one thing – BDC Catalog permissions are INHERITED permissions. It means that you need explicitly copy all BDC permissions to your user :) Really bizarre.

Solution: Navigate to BDC Catalog Permissions page, select your admin user and click “Copy all permissions to descendants”. Detailed instruction is there: http://blogs.msdn.com/mutaz/archive/2008/12/14/ssp-admin-cannot-manage-existing-bdc-applications.aspx

Updated: http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2008/12/17/windows-server-2008-wfe-will-not-allow-large-file-uploads.aspx

Hail to Mutaz, helping to nail down this issue.

Mirror: BDC Permission Inheritance

Testing SharePoint was always an issue, because SharePoint has number of classes that are sealed and/or does not have public constructors. SharePoint's API consists heavily of sealed classes and classes with internal constructors. None of existed unit-testing frameworks provided ability to mock such classes.

Guys from TypeMock (http://www.typemock.com) did fantastic work, providing really powerful framework to mock such classes, which were not covered with existed frameworks, like RhinoMock and Moq or NUnit mocks.

And today, they announced Isolator for sharepoint:

It is almost the same as Typemock Isolator, but will only work on APIs that are directly connected with sharepoint’s API. That means that if you only need to test sharepoint stuff, you can get a powerful product, for a much cheaper price than the full Isolator (you can always upgrade later if you need to isolate more APIs).

Info for masses, how to get free licence:

Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here.

The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.

PS: I’m using this framework in these days and found it really handy. Moreover, guys from TypeMocks are open for communications and framework extensibility if your find something what’s missed or you wanted to have there.  

Mirror: TypeMock - first unit test framework for SharePoint

Guys from Combined-Knowledge published white papers which are really practical and illustrated with step-by-step instructions.

Good stuff.

Btw, these guy runs SharePoint Training around the Australia

Mirror: Practical SharePoint White Papers

In my previous post I described list of documents you need to manage for your SharePoint engagement.

In this post I’d like to publish my “best practices” for planning and configuring your SharePoint Farm across organizations. There are number of documents, describing such requirements for SharePoint Farm, but those documents are usually writing without taking into account your infrastructure scope. You never install SharePoint in isolated environment, and what you setup is usually interfere with the whole organization strategy and infrastructure design.

Infrastructure

1. Inspect your organization network topology to know where all application servers are installed (AD, File Server, Mail Servers and etc) and location of networ services  - firewalls, proxies and etc;
2. Find out all hardware devices - accelerators (WAN, XML), routers and etc. across your network. This information affects your selected SharePoint Farm topology.
3. Find out the person who administrate corporate firewalls. Firewalls affect the SharePoint farm design from the very beginning and you need to open number of ports during configuring farm.
4. Plan your farm topology - intranet and extranet, based on the info gathered earlier. I usually prefer to achieve “6+ server farm with Back-to-back perimeter topology with content publishing”, with some variations, depending on the client’s requirements. I like this topology, because it provides good availability, reliability and security.
5. Measure the latency to different SharePoint Server Role boxes (Query, Index, and etc servers) according your design to reorganize your boxes and Server Roles to have the fastest response time and design your SharePoint farm properly.
6. Install Microsoft Office 2007.
7. Install all Windows Updates and Service Packs.
8. Start SharePoint installation with WSS/MOSS + SP1 integrated. Don’t go with WSS/MOSS installation and then applying SP1, because this way has some issues  - small bugs with installing future updates
9. Check if SSL works (open SharePoint Office Web Service via https://), if not – don’t go further till you fix it. This is very critical stuff, because otherwise your can’t set SharePoint roles on other boxes in your farm. I had some negative experience in this area, when you can't use other boxes in your farm and only Application boxes are available for Index and Query roles, because SSL was broken.
10. Install the latest Infrastructure Upgrade after you setup your farm (August at the current moment, not July), But be careful and refer to documentation how to do it correctly (start with WSS Upgrade and only after install MOSS upgrade). Follow the right sequence of installing all updates Service Pack->The latest Infrastructure Update –> All the latest Cumulative  Updates. Refer to this detailed instruction
11. Don’t install different SharePoint hotfixes, if they are not published in Infrastructure Updates or Cumulative Updates.  Do it, only if you have very specific problems which really cause you troubles. Those hotfixes are temporary solution before the next Infrastructure Update, and they are not properly tested.
12. Check if SSL for SharePoint Office Web Service works again.
13. Plan how much site collections and sub sites you need. I prefer to have one site collections with number of sub sites rather than create several site collections. The reason for this is that each new site collection server like a new web application with isolated scope to features, templates and search. You hardly need this. So, start with only one site collections, and try to avoid number of new site collection if you don’t have solid reasons for this.
14. Plan your site collection and sites location among content databases. Don’t end up with one big content database, because you can’t optimize your data usage in this case. Refer to my recent post, where I described why you need to plan your content databases: http://msmvps.com/blogs/laflour/archive/2008/10/14/tips-to-create-a-site-collection-in-new-content-database.aspx
15. Setup SQL mirroring when you have empty content databases. Your DR box usually locates outside your organization with limited connections, and setting mirroring for big content database is very slow process.
16. Save all your command and prefer to script everything you do during installing and configuring SharePoint Farm, because it saves your time when something going wrong and you need to reinstall your box.

Development

1. Use separate SharePoint installation (different from Production) for development, because production boxes should be clean, without all those development tools you are going to use. I  usually use virtualized environment
2. I prefer to have .NET 3.5 and VS 2008  with SQL 2008 + TFS 2008 servers for development environment
3. “Visual Studio WSS Extensions” simplifies your work, but only if you are working on “proof-of-concept”. I prefer not to use it in real development, because there are some bugs, and you can use several alternative tools  http://laflour.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!7575E2FFC19135B4!1047.entry
4. Setup Visual Studio SharePoint solution via the following template, http://blogs.msdn.com/gderun/archive/2008/01/11/sharepoint-visual-studio-project-and-deployment-templates.aspx . It simplify moving you package builds to TFS

Post-Installation Tasks

1. Maintain your database to improve performance. Follow this guideline

That's all. I welcome to hear some of yours "best practices", if you have any

Mirror: Best Practices to plan and configure your SharePoint Farm across corporate infrastructure

There are number of posts and documents about how to setup mirroring of SharePoint content DB, but when I started my mirroring I stumbled over number issues, which I probably missed in documentation and which took some of my time to find out what was wrong. So in this post I’d like summarize all important parts of setting SharePoint mirroring.

Refer to detailed description in the end of this post to get the initial understanding.

1. Prepare all you SharePoint Content databases for recovery. Use “ALTER Database <databasename> SET RECOVERY FULL;“ SQL command against all databases which will participate in backup and mirroring.
2. (Optionally) Prepare content databases to be detached from web application, because in future you could rename it. To do this run “stsadm -o preparetomove -contentdb SQLSERVER:DBNAME –site <url>”.
3. Make the SharePoint farm backup, and restore it on your Disaster Recovery (DR) box. Use OOTB backup/restore – Central Admin –> Operations –> Backup. The reason to restore SharePoint on DR box instead of straight mirroring is to have everything set and configured absolutely the same as on production box, to have minimum restoration time.
4. After you restore your instance on DR box close SharePoint Central Admin. You don’t need it anymore :)
5. Make SQL backup of your SharePoint DBs and their LOGs from production box, which will be mirrored. Usually only content databases are mirrored - search and other stuff can be missed, because it’s not so vital as content DB. I had number issues with making SQL backups and restore DBs on DR box, after you restored your new instance, so, I found more convenient to provide new copy of all DBs specially for mirroring. Make this backup with SQL commands “BACKUP DATABASE/LOG” and copy those files to DR box.
6. Go to SQL Management Studio and delete all SharePoint DB which you want to mirror.
7. Restore your databases with “NORECOVERY” attribute. UI doesn’t help you, so we are using SQL command “RESTORE DATABASE … NORECOVERY …” for this.
8. After restoration completed you will see your DB with new icon and having “(recovering…)” status. Now time to apply the logs with the same “NORECOVERY” attribute and the similar command “RESTORE LOG … NORECOVERY…”
9. Wait a couple of minutes, allowing SQL server to restore some stuff.
10. Now connect to Production SQL instance from DR box, select the database you just restored in DR, and right-mouse clicking, selecting tools->mirroring. Mirroring Wizards will start. Go through all steps. Ignore mirroring endpoints name difference. But pay attention on “encryption” settings on principal and on mirror boxes – they must be the same. Use next command to change these settings “ALTER ENDPOINT Mirroring FOR DATA_MIRRORING (ROLE = PARTNER, ENCRYPTION = SUPPORTED)” to be the same among principal and mirror boxes.
11. Activate mirroring in the end of Mirroring Wizard, and you DB status will changed to “principal”/”mirroring”.
12. You might have security error, saying that your DR box can’t connect to partner (production box). Go to SQL again and run the following “alter database myDatabase set partner = 'TCP://abc.domain.net:7024';”
13. Repeat everything from step 6 to 11 for all SharePoint databases.
14. To switch to DR box and start using mirrored databases, you need to go to mirroring window again and press “FAILOVER” button. This will switch your databases and DR boxes will be active. Without failover you site on DR box won’t be accessible.

Troubleshooting:

1) User SQL Management Studio, right mouse click on DB, Tasks->Launch Database Mirroring Monitor to check the status of your mirroring databases.

2) You can have the following error “Cannot open database "<…>" requested by the login. The login failed. Login failed for user '….'.” when you try to use “stsadm –o addcontentdb …”. This happens when you DB not in failover status. You need to make your DR failovered (active) and only then add content DB

That’s all. I hope this post will save some of your time when you start your SharePoint mirroring.

More reading:

• SQL 2005 Database Mirroring Tutorial 
• Troubleshooting Database Mirroring Deployment
• Whitepaper - Using database mirroring 
• http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2007/04/23/sql-server-2005-database-mirroring-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-part-1-introduction-overview-and-basics.aspx
• http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2007/05/25/sql-server-2005-database-mirroring-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-part-2-configuration.aspx
• http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2007/08/01/sql-server-2005-database-mirroring-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-part-3-failover.aspx

Mirror: SharePoint Mirroring

When a new SharePoint project is about to start I use the following steps to design and plan solution

1. Creating Vision/Scope
2. Site structure and Navigation
3. Use Case Scenarios
4. Data Flow scenario
5. Content location
6. Site Collection Boundaries
7. List of required features and site definitions
8. Security: Roles and Permissions
9. Page Wireframes: layouts and content types
10. Targeting
11. Search strategy (scopes, authoritative, best bets)
12. Infrastructure Plan 
13. Disaster Recovery
14. Deployment plan

Take into account that SharePoint SDLC differs from standard development, and not all projects require those steps.

Mirror: Starting SharePoint solution and planning your documentation

Today @jthake posted info about the recent announcement from Microsoft that they finally started to support “Virtualized SharePoint environment” for

• Virtual PC
• vmWare
• Win2k8 hyper-v

What does it mean for end-users, developers or IT guys?! Nothing.

It mostly the question of taking the official decision for managers, what and where will be deployed. Because in case of any problems Microsoft will help you in troubleshooting, but not for SharePoint under one of virtualized environment. You must had a installation on physical boxes.

Now it’s now an issue. They announced support of virtualized SharePoint environments

Mirror: MS officially supports SharePoint virtualized environment

Working of migration of SPS to MOSS 2007 in these days and would like to share my experience about number of small tricks, which really annoys you if you don’t know them, and which could save hours during your next migration

1. Check that SharePoint 2003 doesn’t have Orphans. There are several ways for this
2. Remove EXE, MSI, DLL extension from blocked types, because these files could exist in your collection and your can’t export such sites. (I usually remove everything from there)
3. Check source web.config to migrate all 3^rd party Web Parts into new environment (use –haltonwarning in stsadm –o export to find the pages with missed Web Parts and then navigate to source pages to export DWP from there)
4. Export with –incluseuseonwers attribute to
5. Change the maximum upload file size: Central admin ->Application management ->Web Application General Settings. Set 250mb for example, or the size of the biggest file
6. Set yourself as secondary admin(stsadm –o siteowner –url <site> –secondarylogin <user_name>), because export wont work against content if you are not admin on target site collections
7. Before making export make sure that you are site owner for the sites you are going to export (stsadm –o siteowner –url <site> –secondarylogin <current_account>). Otherwise you can’t create any sub-sites during importing and will get strange errors.
8. Use STSADM –o export with cabsize 1024, otherwise you silently miss some files in your export package if your site size more that 25Mb (default value)

Update: be very careful with renaming database, because if you will do it wrong way you DB is completely screwed, and there is no way to return it back. Refer to this document http://blogs.technet.com/corybu/archive/2007/06/01/detaching-databases-in-moss-2007-environments.aspx about the right process how to rename database

Update 2: Make sure that you have latest SP installed for your SharePoint 2003 

Update 3: Check your publishing pages (if you have any) by trying to edit them. Sometimes they can be broken after migration. You need to use these approaches – one and two to fix it.

You are welcome to share your migration tricks which saved your time

Mirror: SharePoint 2007 migration tips

After installing SharePoint 2008 (WSS/MOSS) Infrastructure Update from July 2008 you may find that “Blocked file types” page is broken (Central Administration –> Operations –> Blocked file types). Albeit it worked before, 10 mins ago, but now you end up with the following exception

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.   at Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.BlockedFileTypePage.InitializeValues()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.BlockedFileTypePage.OnLoadComplete(EventArgs e)
   at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)

What it means, that SharePoint can’t resolve your WebApplicationID (GUID of your site) from Content DB.

The fully qualified URL for “Blocked file types” looks like “http://<CentralAdmin>:<port>/_admin/BlockedFileType.aspx?WebApplicationId=fa221a6a-42a2-4a09-8aac-76a31f160880”.

I have no idea why SharePoint can’t resolve web application after Infrastructure Update, something wrong happened and your site just can’t be found. I didn’t test with SQL Profiler, but expect that nothing returning from Content DB

To fix this you need just to create new Web Application :) That’s all. At this time the Content DB tables will be updated with new web app and GUID, and “Blocked file types” will start work again.

Mirror: SharePoint Infrastructure Update (WSS/MOSS) and exception with “Blocked file types” page

Web Parts are an important and everywhere used part of SharePoint. Web Parts are documented pretty good and there are several sources describing as just ASP.NET WebParts (Darren Neimke book) and some resources about Web Parts in SharePoint as well. But in reality SharePoint WebPart specific stuff is not properly documented, and in this post I’d like to publish some tips regarding Web Parts in SharePoint

General Info

Not all Web Parts are inherited from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart class. Some of them comes from Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart, which is inherited from the System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart now. When you develop your own Web Parts, in mostly cases you need to inherit from System.Web WebPart class

Finding the connections

For some tasks you might handle the Web Part connection/disconnection programmatically. For example, connect your Web Part via code or via Page Layouts. To do this you need to know the Consumer and Provider names. It’s not the problem for your Web Parts, but how to find the Provider name for the out-of-the-box Web Parts?! For this you need to use Reflector.

First, to know the class name of SharePoint Web Part you need just put any Web Part to the page and export it to XML. In that XML you will find the assembly and class name.  After that open that assembly in Reflector and navigates to the class you need to get Provider name. Scrutinize that Web Part class to find the connections and name of Provider connection. Connection may be not exactly in that class, but in one of the base classes.

For example for Page Filter Web Parts the Provider name is “ITransformableFilterValues”

Deploying Web Parts with connections

If you deploy you pages and want to have Web Parts being already connected for each new page user creates, then you need to connect Web Part via XML description inside Page Layout.

Connection consists from 3 parts:

• Consumer ID and Name –which you know, because usually it’s you own custom Web Parts
• Provider ID and Name – I described above how to extract that name
• Name of the parameter you select from dialog box when connect Web Parts manually.

So, let’s start:

1. Put any Web Parts to your Page Layout (I use SharePoint Designer for this, because it simplify my work), save page and navigate to the code.
2. In code find the <WebPartPages:WebPartZone> section, and there you will find you Web Parts markup tagged with <Components: prefix.
3. Find the ProviderID attribute of the Web Parts you want to connect and remember values . These values will be used when we create the connection between Web Parts.
4. Open your page in browser to verify it works.
5. Connect Web Parts manually, and save the name of the parameter which is shown in the popup dialog box when you connect Web Parts
6. Remove connections between Web Parts, and return back to SharePoint designer
7. Open the Page Layout code and navigate to the very beginning of document. Try to find the following section “<WebPartPages:SPProxyWebPartManager”. If you don’t have this section you can miss the following step
8. Add the <WebPartPages:SPProxyWebPartManager runat="server" ID="ProxyWebPartManager">  section inside “PlaceHolderMain” content holder
9. Now, we are ready to create connections. Add the following codesnippet inside SPProxyWebPartManager

   1: <SPWebPartConnections>

   2:            <WebPartPages:SPWebPartConnection ID="g_myConnectionName"

   3:                ConsumerConnectionPointID="IFilterValues" ConsumerID="WebPartA"

   4:                ProviderConnectionPointID="ITransformableFilterValues" ProviderID="WebPartB">

   5:                <WebPartPages:TransformableFilterValuesToFilterValuesTransformer MappedConsumerParameterName="Parameter">

   6:                </WebPartPages:TransformableFilterValuesToFilterValuesTransformer>

   7:            </WebPartPages:SPWebPartConnection>

   8: </SPWebPartConnections>

      Let’s review the “blue” selections, because it’s where connection magic happens

• g_myConnectionName is the name of current connection, can be any name
• IFilterValues – Consumer interface name of Web Part which accept connection
• WebPartA – consumer Web Part ID from the WebPartZone section we found and remembered previously
• ITransformableFilterValues – Provider interface name of Web Part which provides connection (in this sample I used Page Filter web parts and they have such provider name. Refer to the “Finding the connections” section where I described how to extract the names
• WebPartB – provider Web Part ID from the WebPartZone section we found and remembered previously
• Parameter – the name from the connection dialog box where you select the parameter

10.  Save the page layout. Go to SharePoint and create the new page based on that page layout. After page will be created you can find that your Web Parts are already connected. Job done!

Take into account, that you can’t change Web Parts connection for pages created for the Page Layouts with predefined Web Part connections.

Mirror: Deploying SharePoint Web Parts as a part of PageLayouts in MOSS 2007

In these days SharePoint become more and more popular. There are number of web project which starts directly in SharePoint, but however a lot of project remains out the SharePoint scope, and exists as pure ASP.NET application.

The one of the common task of migrating ASP.NET application to SharePoint is changing the site landing page to become SharePoint page. But it’s where the problem starts. ASP.NET applications tend to consume different modern tools and technologies like ASP.NET MVC, SilverLight, URL Rewriting and others which seems to be very common in pure ASP.NET development, but could be the potential problems in SharePoint world.

There are three thing you need to concentrate on

1) master.page

• Remove AutoEventWireup="true" attribute. SharePoint doesn’t support it on all pages;
• User controls are not supported on master.page, so move them to CONTROLTEMPLATES folder and change references
• Check that all classes you inherit from has the namespaces

2) CSS

• SharePoint doesn’t support CSS validation on 100%, so I can hardly recommend something specific here. But what did helped me a lot id debuging and CSS customization is just to have the “clean” CSS file, which resets all customization http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

3) Web.config

• You need to make sure that you are using the right siteMap defaultProvider (<siteMap section>) from your ASP.NET web.config, otherwise all your SiteMap elements will be considered as Sharepoint Publishing classes elements (if u have MOSS), which are differs from asp.net SiteMap classes
• If you are using URL rewriting or other specific modules you need to create the <system.webServer> section in SharePoint config file and add them there.
• You need to add all your DLLS to the list of SafeControls

4) Code

• You need to have [assembly: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers()] in your dlls.
• DLLs must be signed
• All classes must have namespaces

Mirror: http://msmvps.com/blogs/laflour/archive/2008/07/10/moving-asp-net-master-page-to-sharepoint.aspx

In the current project we are using SharePoint Designer 2007 intensively to create number of PageLayouts, especially to put WebParts there and pre-configure WebParts connections. SPD is not such a bad tool, because there is no alternative for this. But time to time it really buggy and awful that you start thinking if it passed QA team before being released. (event SP1 doesn’t solve a lot of common crucial bugs, which stops you using SPD at all)

The most disgusting stuff of SharePoint Designer is that it formats your pages markup without asking you. And what’s worse it REMOVES some tags. I really can’t understand that behaviour – WHY it removes what you typed when you save document?!

Recently, we stumble over the very nasty thing of SPD – accidental formatting. We have a PageLayout with several web parts on the page and we created <SPWebPartConnections> section to predefine WebParts connections. But whenever you save your document, SPD for some reasons removes some of your <SPWebPartConnections>. We spent about 2 hours to understand any dependencies or logic, but without success. It seems that they have some kind of RAND which selects which of the SPWebPartConnections tags to remove. We tried to install several hotfixes for SPD – but nothing works.

So, the only way is to use other tools, like Visual Studio. But there is a problem. If you are edit your pageLayout in Visual Studio and want to test it, you need to re-deploy your pagelayouts each time, because VS doesn’t support check-in/check-out to SharePoint Content DB.

But there is alternative way to edit your pages and have check-in support from the Visual Studio. SharePoint has very cool “file system” feature. It means that you can navigate to your PageLayouts from explorer,  open them in any editor and save it back. All your changes will be stored in Content DB(!!)

To do this your need to open Windows Explorer and navigate to My Network Places. On the left side you will see the “Add Network Places” item. Open it and type there “http://<yoursite>/_catalogs/masterpage/”, type the name of your network folder like “MySite PageLayouts” and press OK.

Now, if you open the “MySite PageLayouts” item from Windows Explorer->My Network Places you will see the content of your “_catalogs/masterpage/” SharePoint folder. And now your can open your masterPage or PageLayouts in any editor, edit them and save them. All changes will be stored into ContentDB. But don’t forget to checkout your file before editing (via Sharepoint or SPD)

So, this trick allows you to edit any SharePoint files and forget about SharePoint Designer issues

Mirror: SharePoint Designer removes tags when saves page layout - “file system” feature workaround

In my previous SharePoint projects I've met the situations when you need to outstreem some binary files, like PDF file or something else, but when you do this by the standard way (how you used to do in normal ASP.NET site) you found that page is "dead" after you streamed you file to the client. By "dead" I mean that it doesn't respond to any events, and you can't use this page.

The problem lies in the SharePoint JavaScript files, which are integrated into the each web page, and seems that they protect you from unnecessary double-posts. But unfortunately such behaviour breaks your stream output.

I didn't have a change to investigate this problem in details, to find out what exactly affects on this, and always solved this by putting stream out in the new popup window.

In these days on SharePoint NGs this question was risen and "andyspears" posted a work-around, how to change the SharePoint JS and return the normal behaviour back.

   1: //1) Set your button's client-side click event to: 

   2: "exportRequested=true;" 

   3:  

   4: //2) register the following JS: 

   5: string beforeSubmitJS = "\nvar exportRequested = false; \n"; 

   6: beforeSubmitJS += "var beforeFormSubmitFunction = theForm.onsubmit; \n"; 

   7: beforeSubmitJS += "theForm.onsubmit = function(){ \n"; 

   8: beforeSubmitJS += "var returnVal = beforeFormSubmitFunction(); \n"; 

   9: beforeSubmitJS += "if(exportRequested && returnVal) 

  10:     {_spFormOnSubmitCalled=false; exportRequested=false;} \n"; 

  11:  

  12: //beforeSubmitJS += "alert(returnVal + '\\n' + _spFormOnSubmitCalled);"; 

  13: beforeSubmitJS += "return returnVal; \n"; 

  14: beforeSubmitJS += "}; \n"; 

  15:  

  16: //beforeSubmitJS += "alert(theForm.onsubmit);"; 

  17: this.Page.ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript(this.GetType(), "alterFormSubmitEvent", beforeSubmitJS, true); 

Thanks AdnySpears, good work!

Mirror: Page events stop working after using output stream for binary download

The Content Query Web Part (CQWP) in MOSS is one of the popular out-of-the-box Publishing components which is used in content management sites, allowing you to get results from different sources.

But sometimes out of the box functionality is not enough to meet your requirements, and you need to customize CQWP. There are several resources describing how to do this - 1, 2, 3, 4

The most important features which are missed in CQWP are:

• overriding query to use custom CAML
• enabling web-part connections

To implement these functionality you need to subclass ContentByQueryWebPart class and override several methods.

Below I will describe what exactly need to be done to achieve desired behaviour.

Query Override

To have custom CAML query in your Web part you need to override CreateChildControls base method. You can find samples how to do this in the references above, but it's done so implicitly, that you can easily spend hours to find out why you code doesn't work and gives you different errors

The crucial part is in the way sending the query to the base class within overrided CreateChildControls

   1: protected override void CreateChildControls()

   2: {

   3:     this.QueryOverride = customQueryString;

   4:  

   5:     base.CreateChildControls();

   6:  

   7:     QueryOverride = string.Empty;

   8:  

   9:     CommonViewFields = string.Empty;

  10: }

First, you need to set your custom query to the "this.QueryOverride" to inform base class about query - line 3

Second, call base CreateChildControls() allowing your query being executed - line 5

Third and last - CLEAN query and view fields properties - line 7,9. Without this step you will get errors when open your Web Part in edit mode

Enabling Connection

The Content Query WP doesn't accept any connections by default. You need to implement this too. Everything you need to to is just add ConnectionConsumer attribute. But trick in setting the right attribute which is used in Parameter dialog box, when you connect two web-parts.

   1: [ConnectionConsumer("Another WebPart", "IFilterValues", AllowsMultipleConnections = true)]

   2: public void SetConnectionInterface(IFilterValues filterProvider)

   3: {

   4:     if (filterProvider != null)

   5:     {

   6:         // save provider with values

   7:         providerValues = filterProvider.ParameterValues;

   8:         _filterProviders.Add(filterProvider);  // variable declaration is List<IFilterValues> _filterProviders = new List<IFilterValues>();

   9:         List<ConsumerParameter> parameters = new List<ConsumerParameter>();

  10:         

  11:         // add params

  12:         parameters.Add(new ConsumerParameter("param1",

  13:                 ConsumerParameterCapabilities.SupportsSingleValue |

  14:                 ConsumerParameterCapabilities.SupportsEmptyValue));

  15:         parameters.Add(new ConsumerParameter("param2",

  16:                 ConsumerParameterCapabilities.SupportsMultipleValues |

  17:                 ConsumerParameterCapabilities.SupportsAllValue |

  18:                 ConsumerParameterCapabilities.SupportsEmptyValue));

  19:  

  20:         filterProvider.SetConsumerParameters(new ReadOnlyCollection<ConsumerParameter>(parameters));

  21:  

  22:         }

  23: }

Method name can be any, but pay attention which provider you are using . WebPart providers send data via different provider interfaces, for example when you are working with Filtering web parts (like "Current User Filter" web part) then you need to "listen" your incoming connections via IFilterValues (thx Mutaz for this findings), for other WB it could be IWebPartField or IWebPartRow.

If you are expecting to get data from WP via unsupported provider you connection link will be dimmed

Practical Sample

@d2design kindly asked to provide practical sample, for example how to use current user as a keyword :)

Actually, it's good example which shows how use both features I described.

To do this you need to have:

1. ShareServices (SSP) with UserProfile, where current userName is stored
2. "Current User Filter" WebPart, to get the userName from SSP. It returns you logged user name by default (not necessary actually, as well as SSP, because you could resolve you user name via standard asp.net User class when construct custom query)
3. Enable WebPart connections as I described above. You need to use IFilterValue interface for "Current User Filter" and store your incoming user name in variable.
4. Override query to include your userName in resulted custom query.

TIPS:

1. When you are quering content which is not published and approved (like pages) you wont be able to see that content on the page in final view. You data will be available in page edit mode only, because they are treated as "draft" data.
2. <OrderBy>CAML tag is not parsed by CQWP, you need to remove it from your query and set the related order field of CQWP class<OrderBy>CAML tag is not parsed by CQWP, you need to remove it from your query and set the related order field of CQWP class

Mirror: Subclassing Content Query Web Part to override CAML query