SharePoint Joe

Hiding the Title Field on a Form, with or without code

2010-04-27T05:55:00.000-07:00

New post at JoeSharePoint.com - Hiding the Title Field on a Form, with or without code:
http://www.joesharepoint.com/?p=92

SharePoint Form Javascript Part II: Read Only Textbox

2010-04-21T19:52:00.000-07:00

New post at joesharepoint.com: Setting a edit form textbox to be read only - http://www.joesharepoint.com/?p=85

SharePoint Edit Form Javascript Part I: Adding a Form Header

2010-03-24T05:07:00.000-07:00

New Post at JoeSharePoint.com: SharePoint Edit Form Javascript Part I: Adding a Form Header

Setproperty Web Application Not Found on PeoplePicker Domain Restriction

2010-03-24T05:06:00.000-07:00

New Post at JoeSharePoint.com: Setproperty Web Application Not Found on PeoplePicker Domain Restriction

Get Search Core Results Web Part Raw XML

2010-03-24T05:05:00.000-07:00

New Post at JoeSharePoint.com: Get Search Core Results Web Part Raw XML

Sharepoint Single Sign-On Part II: Authentication

2010-02-18T19:06:00.000-08:00

New Post at Joe SharePoint: SharePoint Single Sign-On Part II: Authentication

The Myth of SharePoint Single Sign On

2009-12-29T05:39:00.000-08:00

New blog post at Joe SharePoint: The Myth of SharePoint Single Sign On

WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Retrospect

2009-11-13T04:43:00.000-08:00

New Blog Post at Joe SharePoint: WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Retrospect.

Blog Moving

2009-10-22T05:40:00.000-07:00

I've moved the blog to my new platform at Humboldt Technology Group, New blog is at http://joesharepoint.humboldttechgroup.com

Twitter Workflow as SharePoint Middleware

2009-03-25T11:02:00.001-07:00

First off, let me address the fact that this post is about Twitter. Well, it's about Twitter AND SharePoint if you want to get picky. But ok, it's about Twitter, the one that's always in the news and is very trendy right now. I think it's great; I've learned a ton about SharePoint since I've started following some great SharePoint experts that I found out on WeFollow.Com.

What problems can Twitter solve with SharePoint? For one, it provides a platform to share out data that might be behind a corporate intranet, or existing within a secured SharePoint site. Every list in SharePoint has a corresponding RSS feed, but they are next to useless because of protected content issues. We can use Twitter as middleware to push out information about our content as it happens. In a sense it is doing what email notifications on a list are, but if there is a #1 complaint I hear from people is that they are absolutely swamped with email.... do they really need another email from a SharePoint site? On top of that...it is from an automated source that means they don't need to respond and are less than likely to read it. This illustrates the concept of having users pull the data instead of having it pushed on them. Furthermore, this is superior to the RSS feeds in SharePoint because you could have multiple workflows on multiple document libraries pushing out data to the same Twitter account; almost a site-wide RSS feed.

So now you're saying, "So you expect everyone in the company to sign up for a twitter account?" No. Twitter has a RSS feed for each public facing account. This could be pulled in by a widget on your non-SP intranet, it could be pulled in by an RSS Reader Webpart, it could be rendered using XSLT. If you have employees who do have twitter accounts, then they could 'Follow' that account as well, or have the workflow post directly to their own account if they wished.

On to the workflow, the "CheepFlow", as I call it. I know, awesome name. When adding the workflow to a list, you are presented an association form where you enter: The Twitter account name, the account password, a Bit.Ly username, and a Bit.Ly api key. This is to shorten the urls that come out of sharepoint, which can get pretty long. Provided you check the 'Start this workflow when a new item is created', when a new document is uploaded, the workflow will "Tweet" an update with the name of the document, the name of the document library, and the shortened url to access it. I set up an account for the sake of this project, you can see it here. The links won't work because they all go to "localhost" :)

I created a project at CodePlex to host the code at http://cheepflow.codeplex.com, please check there for any updates! Credit goes to the team over at Yedda for the C# Twitter Wrapper. If you have any comments or questions I would love to hear them!

STSADM Shortcut

2009-03-18T19:07:00.001-07:00

I think everyone should be able to recite the 12 Hive Path like the pledge of allegiance, but navigating through the file system in explorer or the command shell can be tedious. Use this batch file to open up a command window already in the /12/bin directory. Change the path if your target directory is different! If you don't trust batch files from ol' Uncle (SharePoint) Joe, then save the following line in notepad, and change the extension to .bat

cmd.exe /k cd "C:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin"

SharePoint Form Login Nothing Happens

2009-03-16T13:49:00.000-07:00

Using FBA (Forms-Based Authentication) can be very intimidating, because there are so many interlocking parts, especially if you are using FBA in an extended web application. One problem I have run up against time and time again is after you have everything configured BY THE BOOK, you attempt that first login, hit the 'Sign In' button and nothing happens. The page refreshes, but the username and password fields are empty. Even if you enter the password wrong or a username that doesn't exist, nothing happens! This has to do with the cookies SharePoint is attempting to store. Try your site in Firefox, you should be able to successfully log in.

If this is the case, then you need to add your site to the list of 'Trusted Sites' in your browser. Don't forget to close out your browser before you try to access the site again.

Site Update

2009-03-15T08:11:00.001-07:00

Giving the site a much-needed facelift; please pardon the current state of design quality.

WSS 3.0 Licensing in One Sentence

2009-03-12T19:41:00.000-07:00

I gave my first conference presentation this week at the Brainstorm 10.0 event in Wisconsin Dells; one of the hooks of the presentation was that if you have Windows Server 2003 (or 2008) running somewhere in your network, then you already own SharePoint.

Sure, it's WSS 3.0 and not MOSS 2007, but if you are not a big shop then it can be tough to justify a purchase like Office SharePoint Server. But it's not really free, is it? What about CALs, and Internet Connector licenses? This part always confused me, to be honest. Turns out I was making it WAY more complicated than it needed to be, so here it is:

WSS 3.0 usage is directly bound to the licensing of the server it is on.

What this means is that if you have a server that is already hosting internet-facing websites, then you can host WSS 3.0 on that server and have your SharePoint sites internet-facing as well. If you have a server that is internal to your network then your SharePoint access is restricted to the number of CALs that you already have for that server.

SharePoint Certifications & Microsoft E-Learning

2009-02-25T10:02:00.000-08:00

Just passed my 70-541 and 70-542, now I'm fully MCTS'ed on SharePoint Application Development. While I am sworn to secrecy on what is on those exams, I can tell you how I studied. I read:

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Unleashed
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: The Complete Reference
Microsoft E-learning Collection 6071.

SharePoint Unleashed is great up until the chapters on webservices, which get a little monotonous. The MOSS: Complete Reference book on the other hand is excellent for an overall knowledge of configuring SharePoint, which is partially mirrored in the Object Model; if you haven't spent a lot of time getting your hands dirty with SharePoint I would suggest this book as the next best thing. It also contains some basic code samples that help round out what is gleaned from the Unleashed book.

I had a lot of trouble purchasing the courses, so a tip for registration with E-Learning that might help, especially if you have your Live ID integrated into every Microsoft Site on the Internet. You might get an error message repeatedly while trying to purchase a course on the E-Learning site; the particular error I experienced occurred the step following acceptance of the TOS, a very descriptive "an error has occurred" kind of error. I thought it was an outage but a day later I was still getting the same error. To side-step this issue, sign up for a new Live ID with an email that you've NEVER used with Microsoft before. I think the registration process tries to pull up information off of your Live ID from several sources and ends up choking on it. Aside from that, the E-Learning courses are great for preparing for the exams. Really. This is probably the best experience I've had with Microsoft, plus I can use the courses as reference materials for another year-and-a-half, and there is some really good material on there.

Can't Debug SharePoint Workflow

2008-09-18T12:39:00.000-07:00

This is probably the toughest thing I've run up against yet with SharePoint. I won't share how much time was involved. *shudder*

I was not able to hit the breakpoints I added to my custom workflow in Visual Studio 2005. I attached to the w3wp.exe process s of type "Workflow", I compiled the dll in debug mode, I even made sure the appropriate .pdb resided in the same gac_msil directory as my assembly in the gac. Nothing.

Further frustrating the issue, and at the time unknowingly related, was the fact that once a workflow was initiated on a list item, it would give me the infamous "Failed On Start (Retrying)" error. I couldn't debug my workflow to see why it was failing to start. Argh.

Eventually I found this post here (Thank you Irfan Bashir!) , which suggested checking the "Policy for Web Application" section under Sharepoint Central Administration -> Application Management. Make sure your App Pool account for your SharePoint site (in my case "Network Service") has Full Control as opposed to just "Full Read". Restart IIS and try debugging your application again! This should get rid of at least any trouble you have hitting your breakpoints in Visual Studio.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Online

2008-03-07T06:49:00.001-08:00

Microsoft has announced their hosted services strategy recently, one of them being what looks like a hosted MOSS 2007 implementation. I signed up for the beta to check it out, but was relegated to the waiting list. There's not a lot of information out there yet, I'll post more here as I find it. Some things I'd like to know:

Pricing - What will be pricing versus a MOSS 2007 license? Are there different pricing schemes if you intend to have the hosted site internet-facing?

Integration - Can it integrate with your in-house Active Directory? Can you use BDC functionality with your own in-house data sources? These are certainly possible, but how will the security risks be mitigated?

Customization - What support is there for custom components like Workflow, Webcontrols, Custom Field Types, Event Handlers, etc? I've seen hosted SharePoint providers do this kind of thing, but am curious on how Microsoft plans to handle it.

Marketability - I would like to see what the major selling points of this will be. A MOSS 2007 implementation is relatively easy to install and maintain... what benefits could a hosted solution provide? SharePoint is unique (in the hosted application sense) in that some of the best features a business can take advantage of involve bringing disparate elements together into a single location. The offload of maintenance and performance will have to outweigh the pains of integrating a hosted solution with local resources, I would think. There is the trust factor as well. Of course, it is a Microsoft product hosted by Microsoft, and the hosted solution will have all best practices applied....I'm guessing the support will be pretty good too.

More information:

Microsoft Partner Program: Microsoft Office SharePoint Online

Microsoft Parner Program: Microsoft Online Services

Using dll.config for GAC in a SharePoint Web

2008-02-29T07:55:00.001-08:00

When building custom SharePoint event handlers, the compiled dll is installed to the GAC and is referenced by Windows SharePoint Services.... but what if the assembly has custom attributes that require a config file? Let's say for example, that you want to store smtp information to send out emails on a list item change, and it varies from site to site. Where do you put it?

The answer is that it isn't any different than if the assembly was referenced inside of a web application's bin folder. The custom attributes should reside in the web.config file in the SharePoint site web root. If you aren't sure where the directory that is mapped to the Sharepoint Web resides, open up the IIS Manager, right-click your SharePoint Web folder, and select "Open". Now add your custom properties to this web.config file, save your changes and restart IIS. Don't forget to add the configSection for your custom application settings!

More Information:
MSDN:configSections Element (General Settings Schema)

Spreadsheet Export Link Custom Column Type

2008-02-28T12:36:00.000-08:00

Recently at a client there was a need to export multiple spreadsheets of a list, but each with a different filter. For one or two filters, the easy solution would be to create a different view for each filter of the list, navigate to that view and click on the "Export to Spreadsheet" option. When you go past four or more, it quickly becomes tedious, especially when these spreadsheets are meant to be as current as possible. My first solution to this was to add a Link Webpart to a page, and each link would export one of the views of the list. You can read about how to format the link a spreadsheet export link here. Although it was much easier for the user to generate these spreadsheets now that they were all in one place, it required a great deal of additional knowledge to maintain, in that the GUIDs for the view and the list need to be determined and added to the link.

So what next? Turns out, this is a perfect fit for a Custom Field Type! Specifically, an extended SPFieldMultiColumn. Why the Multi-column? We use the Multi-column so that the generated link will look nice and hide the user-scaring querystring in the spreadsheet url. For more in-depth coding and configuration of a custom field type read here.

Here's the code in vb (for all you out there that don't like the above referenced c# example)
ViewSpreadsheetField.vb
ViewSpreadsheetFieldControl.ascx
ViewSpreadsheetFieldControl.vb
FLDTYPES_SpreadsheetLink.xml

Here is where the magic really happens:
Public Function GetViewLink(ByVal columnViewKey As String) As LinkValue
Dim targetListGUID As System.Guid = SPContext.Current.List.Lists(TargetList).ID
Dim fieldValue As String = SPContext.Current.Item(columnViewKey).ToString()
Dim viewGUID As System.Guid = SPContext.Current.List.Lists(TargetList).Views(fieldValue).ID
Dim sbLink As New StringBuilder
sbLink.AppendFormat("/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=109&Using=_layouts/query.iqy&List={0}{1}{2}", _
"{", targetListGUID.ToString, "}")
sbLink.AppendFormat("&View={0}{1}{2}&CacheControl=1", _
"{", viewGUID.ToString, "}")
Dim tempLink As LinkValue = New LinkValue
tempLink.Description = fieldValue & " - View"
tempLink.Hyperlink = sbLink.ToString
Return tempLink
End Function

We retrieve the list GUID, and then use that to to retrieve the view GUID. Then we are able to format our link querystring to export the spreadsheet. These values are then extracted in the RenderPattern section in the FLDTypes xml. Make sure you have a good understanding of the LinkValue class, which inherits from the SPFieldMultiColumnValue class. The SPFieldMultiColumn is populated with SPFieldMultiColumnValue's, which is what allows us to use the <Column SubColumnNumber="0" HTMLEncode="TRUE" /> format when it comes to display rendering. You could add more properties on the LinkValue class for Alt tags, link targets, images, etc. and access them the same way when rendering.

In the FLDTypes_SpreadsheetLink.xml there are two custom fields in the PropertySchema, ColumnFilter and TargetList. These are the column in which to use as the view name lookup, and the list that the views exist on, respectively. The user sets these values when creating the column. More on Custom Field Type XML here.

On your SharePoint list, if the view does not exist for the filter, when the item is created, the link field will remain blank. Once the view is created, go back in to edit the item, and the link will appear if the view is named correctly.

Disclaimer: The code and information in this post are for reference purposes only. Please check with relevant best practices and standards before implementing in a business environment.

More Information:
Share This Point: v3 Creating Custom Field Types
MSDN: Custom Field Type Definition
Westin's Technical Log: How To Create a Hyperlink to SharePoint's List Export to Spreadsheet

CAML with Multi-Value Lookup Fields

2008-02-26T09:17:00.000-08:00

When using the WSS 3.0 Web Services to access your lists, you might have a list that contains a Multi-Value Lookup Field; that is to say, a Lookup Field that has the "Allow Multiple Values" option checked. These types of fields are a bit shaky in SharePoint, although some quirks have been addressed in the recent Service Pack 1 upgrade. A regular CAML query to insert a new item would look something like this:

<Method ID="1" Cmd="New">
   <Field Name="FirstName">John</Field>
   <Field Name="LastName">Doe</Field>
   <Field Name="Email\">johndoe@johndoe.com</Field>
</Method>

So now you want a field where the user can select multiple items, and these items are populated from another list. Let's say there is a section on a form that allows a user to sign-up for multiple mailing lists. On the back-end these would be managed in their own list, "Mailing Topic", and would be the source for our lookup column. We will call the lookup column "My Subscriptions". Here is the contents of our "Mailing Topic" list:
ID  Topic Name
1    New Hires
2    Promotions
3    Leaving

We will submit the same CAML, but with the new field added and all three options included:

<Method ID="1" Cmd="New">
   <Field Name="FirstName">John</Field>
   <Field Name="LastName">Doe</Field>
   <Field Name="Email\">johndoe@johndoe.com</Field>
   <Field Name="MySubscriptions\">
      1;#New Hires;#2;#Promotions;#3;#Leaving
   </Field>
</Method>

The format is: ID#;Lookup Field Value. Separate additional values by ";#". If you look in the list with the lookup column after a successful submission, you will see all the items, but minus the #;ID's and delineated with a comma instead.

MOSS 2007 SMTP and POP3

2007-05-08T10:45:00.000-07:00

Recently I learned that document libraries can be enabled to receive emails and attachments. Each document library (and some types of lists) can have it's own email address, and within that library rules can be set so as to route the emails and attachments to different folders based on subject line or sender. The mind reels at he possibilities! So, I set out to see it for myself. I came across this excellent whitepaper here, outlining the configuration steps on the server and site.

Now, if you're like me, your environment is not a dedicated SharePoint server. Amongst the myriad of applications that are running, my server has been configured as a SMTP and POP3 server, which will cause conflict when it comes to enabling your SharePoint sites to receive email. The conflict occurs when the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service attempts to query the \mailroot\drop folder. There will never be an email there because the POP3 service grabs the .eml files as soon as they arrive. Attempting to copy these files back into the \mailroot\drop directory from their respective mailbox folders OR pointing your incoming email settings to one of the mailboxes instead of the \mailroot\drop folder, results in the following application event error to be written to your event log:

"A critical error occurred while processing the incoming e-mail file E:\Inetpub\mailroot\drop\P3_xxxxxxxxxxxxx. The error was: Bad senders or recipients.."

The reason for this is that the Document Library Email domain and the POP3 domain are the same, causing a conflict over who gets control of the messages.

Solution: Uninstall the POP3 service and add the Document Library Email domain to the SMTP server's domains, OR create a new, differently named domain in the SMTP server's domain, and set that in your Incoming Email configurations.

More Information:
Plan Incoming e-mail (Office SharePoint Server)

Peter's World - MOSS 2007 WSS V3 Incoming Email with Exchange

Various Other Issues with Configuring Incoming Email