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• When SharePoint Designer has its own designs

  - by PeterBrunone

  Recently, a colleague came to me with a simple task and an inscrutable error.  He just wanted to populate a text field with a querystring value.  If you've ever done this in SPD, you know it's fairly simple:  create a parameter, map it to a querystring value, and then use the resulting parameter name in your form field. Having done so, however, he was told the following by the ASP.NET "yellow barf page": The 'Text' property of 'asp:TextBox' does not allow child objects. As it turns out, he had done everything correctly.  The problem was that SharePoint Designer had decided the best place for his FieldDescription control was INSIDE the TextBox control.  Obviously the compiler doesn't know what to do with that.  When the FieldDescription was moved to a less obtrusive location, everything worked as expected.The moral of the story is, as always, don't trust what any WYSIWYG tool gives you.  If it looks great, then fine.  However, if there's a problem, remember that Design mode was written by human beings who make mistakes... just like the rest of us.Take THAT, Skynet.

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• A Quick Primer on SharePoint Customization

  - by PeterBrunone

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} This one goes out to all the people who have been asked to change the way a SharePoint site looks.  Management wants to know how long it will take, and you can whip that out by tomorrow, right?  If you don't have time to prepare a treatise on what's involved, or if you just want to lend some extra weight to your case by quoting a blogger who was an MVP for seven years, then dive right in; this post is for you. There are three main components of SharePoint visual customization:   1)       Theme – A theme encompasses all the standardized text formatting and coloring (borders, fonts, etc), including the background images of various sections. All told, there could be around 50 images involved, and a few hundred CSS (style) classes.  Installing a theme once it’s been created is no great feat.  Given the number of pieces, of course, creating a new theme could take anywhere from a day to a week… once decisions have been made about the desired appearance. 2)      Master Page – A master page provides the framework for page layout.  This includes all the top and side menus, where content shows up, et cetera.  Master pages have been around for a long time in ASP.NET (Microsoft’s web development platform), and they do require some .NET programming knowledge.  Beyond that, in SharePoint, there are a few dozen controls which the system expects find on a given page.  They’re not all used at once, but if they’re not there when they’re needed, chaos ensues.  Estimating a custom master page is difficult, as it depends on the level of customization.  I’ve been on projects where I was brought in simply to fix some problems and add a few finishing touches, and it took 2-3 weeks.  Master page customization requires a large amount of testing time to make sure that the HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and control placement all work well together. 3)      Individual page layout – Each page (ideally) uses a master page for its template, but within the content areas defined by the master page, web parts can be added, removed, and configured from within the browser.  The wireframe that Brent provided could most likely be completed simply by manipulating the content on the home page in this fashion, and we had allowed about a day of effort for the task.  If needed, further functionality can be provided by an experienced ASP.NET developer; custom forms are a common example.  This of course is a bit more in-depth than simple content manipulation and could take several days per page (or more; there’s really no way to quantify this without a set of requirements).   That’s basically it.  To recap:  Fonts and coloring are done with themes, and can take anywhere from a day to a week to create (not counting creative time); required technical skills include HTML, CSS, and image manipulation.  Templated layout is done with master pages, and generally requires a developer familiar with both ASP.NET and SharePoint in particular; it can have far-reaching consequences depending on the complexity of the changes, and could add weeks or months to a project.  Page layout can be as simple as content manipulation in the web browser, taking a few hours per page, or it can involve more detail, like custom forms, and can require programming expertise and significantly more development time.

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• Audiencing with Forms-Based Authentication (FBA)

  - by PeterBrunone

  This really is no different from when you create an audience with regular old NTLM (Windows Authentication).  The difference is that while the AD provider is set up by default in all environments, the extra membership provider (that you use for Forms Authentication) isn't included anywhere except in the web application where you install it.  To be able to find your FBA users in the audience creation tool, you'll need to add the extra membership provider(s) to the web.config for your SSP site in IIS.  At that point, the People Picker should start recognizing your Forms Auth users, and you can create your audience as needed.

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• AgileDotNet in Dallas

  - by PeterBrunone

  This conference was a big hit last time, and now it's better then ever.  If you're wondering about how Agile applies to your daily business, or if you just want to see how it looks when it's done right, you owe it to yourself to check out AgileDotNet on April 30th.

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• Live Meeting error: malformed email address... or IS IT???

  - by PeterBrunone

  During a remote SharePoint training session this morning, Live Meeting presented one of our instructors with the following gem:  "An attendee email address is malformed".  This was particularly troubling since a wizard took care of adding all the entries, and they looked correct (even after being sifted through my character analysis tool).As it turns out, the addresses were indeed correct.  As sometimes happens, though, at the line breaks, it looked like there was no space between the semicolon and the following email address.  Since I'm a member in good standing of the "I wonder what this button does" school of thought, I added an extra space after each of these cramped little semicolons -- and the invitation executed flawlessly.Coincidence?  Maybe... but you can bet I'm going to keep trying dumb stuff like that when the error message doesn't make sense.  Think of it as the tech support equivalent of "Ask a silly question..."

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• SharePointBeginners: A new group for a global noob community

  - by PeterBrunone

  Recently, a discussion broke out (go figure) on a SharePoint list that I frequent.  It had grown in size to the point where the more advanced members were sometimes turned off by the volume of questions that appeared TOO simple.  This happens all the time, as something becomes larger and specialization is necessary.Anyhoo, my response was to create the SharePoint Beginners group.  Come out and join us at http://groups.google.com/group/sharepointbeginners , where no question is too simple; all we ask is to show us that you tried to find the answer.

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• Workflow workarounds: tracking individual column changes

  - by PeterBrunone

  This post is long overdue, but since the question keeps popping up on various SharePoint discussion lists, I figured I'd document the answer here (next time I can just post a link instead of typing the whole thing out again).In short, you cannot trigger a SharePoint workflow when a column changes; you can only use the ItemChanged event.  To get more granular, then, you need to add some extra bits.Let's say you have a list called "5K Races" with a column called StartTime, and you want to execute some actions when the StartTime value changes.  Simply perform the following steps:1)  Create an additional column (same datatype) called OldStartTime.2)  When the workflow starts, compare StartTime to OldStartTime.    a) If they are equal, then do nothing (end).    b) If they are NOT equal, proceed with your workflow.3)  If 2b, then set OldStartTime to the value of StartTime.By performing step 3, you ensure that by the end of the workflow, OldStartTime will be equal to StartTime -- this is important because the workflow will continue to run every time a particular item is changed, but by taking away the criterion that would cause the workflow to run the second time, you have avoided an endless loop situation. 

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• Read-only lock on a SharePoint site collection, or Why can't I edit anymore?

  - by PeterBrunone

  Monday morning, the calls started.  For some reason, long-time users were unable to edit list items.  I figured we had a permissions issue, so I popped in to look at the Site Settings -- and found that I couldn't.  A quick trip to Central Administration showed that I was still listed as a Site Collection Administrator, but I had no power at all on the site collection in question.A quick glance at the logs told me that the server had recently shut down unexpectedly (this is a Hyper-V virtual machine).  Apparently, in the confusion, somehow SharePoint decided to lock the site collection as Read Only.  This can be remedied in one of two ways:1)  In Central Administration, go to Application Management->SharePoint Site Management->Site collection quotas and locks.  Once you have arrived, select the correct application and site collection, and you will have the opportunity to view and set the lock status of the collection (it most likely will be set to "Read-only", and you'll want to move that radio button to "Not locked").2)  Fire up stsadm and issue the following command:stsadm -o setsitelock -url http://myportalsitecollection -lock none

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• SharePoint Client Object Model: Step One

  - by PeterBrunone

  I almost didn't make it out alive.  I followed the instructions in every piece of sample code and every forum post by someone who had no idea why their client OM code wasn't working, and my code still wouldn't get past the page load.  I kept getting "'Type' is undefined" errors when sp.core.js tried to register the SP namespace.As it turns out, you need the help of the default master page (or one like it) to get the object model loaded.  Once I told my sample page to use the default master and modified everything accordingly, it hooked up and ran just fine.Now I can finally get some work done.

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• Generate a Word document from list data

  - by PeterBrunone

  This came up on a discussion list lately, so I threw together some code to meet the need.  In short, a colleague needed to take the results of an InfoPath form survey and give them to the user in Word format.  The form data was already in a list item, so it was a simple matter of using the SharePoint API to get the list item, formatting the data appropriately, and using response headers to make the client machine treat the response as MS Word content.  The following rudimentary code can be run in an ASPX (or an assembly) in the 12 hive.  When you link to the page, send the list name and item ID in the querystring and use them to grab the appropriate data. // Clear the current response headers and set them up to look like a word doc.HttpContext.Current.Response.Clear();HttpContext.Current.Response.Charset ="";HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentType ="application/msword";string strFileName = "ThatWordFileYouWanted"+ ".doc";HttpContext.Current.Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "inline;filename=" + strFileName);// Using the current site, get the List by name and then the Item by ID (from the URL).string myListName = HttpContext.Current.Request.Querystring["listName"];int myID = Convert.ToInt32(HttpContext.Current.Request.Querystring["itemID"]);SPSite oSite = SPContext.Current.Site;SPWeb oWeb = oSite.OpenWeb();SPList oList = oWeb.Lists["MyListName"];SPListItem oListItem = oList.Items.GetItemById(myID);// Build a string with the data -- format it with HTML if you like. StringBuilder strHTMLContent = newStringBuilder();// *// Here's where you pull individual fields out of the list item.// *// Once everything is ready, spit it out to the client machine.HttpContext.Current.Response.Write(strHTMLContent);HttpContext.Current.Response.End();HttpContext.Current.Response.Flush();

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• Why is my content database so large?

  - by PeterBrunone

  If your SharePoint site collection hasn't grown, but your content database has, the most likely culprit is versioning.  If a list -- or worse, a library -- has versioning enabled, the default is to keep every single one.  That means that every time someone edits and checks in a document, its storage footprint increases by the size of the document (and probably a little more).The solution?  It could be a bit painful, but you'll need to go back into each library and restrict the number of versions to keep (three is sufficient for most uses, but your needs may vary).  I suggest keeping only major versions as well, since minor versions are really just stopping points on the way to a published document.Of course if you have a real business need to keep all those versions around, then you'll want to look into an archiving solution that will take the old versions out of the content database but still make them available if necessary.

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• Phone number mask in a DataView WebPart (DVWP)

  - by PeterBrunone

  This came up today on the [sharepointdiscussions] list.  A user needed to display a read-only field in a phone number format; it's pretty simple, but it may be just what you need.Assuming your list item contains a field called "Phone Number" (with a space), the following XPath will give you a number in the classic US telephone format: <xsl:value-of select="concat('(',substring(@Phone_x0020_Number,1,3),')',substring(@Phone_x0020_Number,4,3),'-',substring(@Phone_x0020_Number,7,4))" /> If you need to mask an input, try this jQuery solution.

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