Andy Burns’ SharePoint Blog

I’ve been doing some testing of email enabled lists, and I needed to send quite a lot of emails, so I wrote a little console app to do it. Here’s the core of the code I used, in case I need it again, or it’s useful to someone. It uses System.Net.Mail:

SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient(@"vm-moss2007.virtual.local");
for (int i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
{
    MailMessage message = new MailMessage("administrator@virtual.local", <a href="mailto:testlist@sharepoint.virtual.local">testlist@sharepoint.virtual.local</a>);
    message.Subject = string.Format("Message {0}", i);
    message.Body = string.Format("This is message '{0}'", i);
    Console.WriteLine("Sending {0}", i);
    smtp.Send(message);
}

Tags: Email

The Holy Grail of SharePoint branding - at least as far as I’m concerned – is rounded corners on Web Parts. Every design that comes in has this at first. As mentioned yesterday there are examples of doing this for the web part’s title - I’ve done this using Madalina’s instructions and Heather Solomon has some instructions too.

However, as far as I know nobody has yet figured out a way of putting rounded corners on the bottom corners of web parts. The HTML they have does not suit them to do this via CSS. The only idea I’ve had previously was to use ControlAdapters to modify the output of of the Web Part itself. And I’m pretty sure you’d have to write an adapter per web parts. That kind of sucks; no customer is going to be in a hurry to pay for that.

Well, when I was looking at putting borders around an entire web part zone, I had a thought. What we really need to do is insert elements into our page. jQuery can do that sort of thing. Could I use jQuery to find each web part and wrap some tags around it? Read more »

Tags: jQuery, Rounded Corners, Web Parts

Curiously, one of my more popular blog posts is about putting rounded corners on things in SharePoint. It does seem that this is a pretty popular question. As a side note, Heather Solomon has a post about doing this for web part titles, though I followed Madalina’s instructions.

Anyway, one design requirement that come up repeatedly is rounded borders on Web Parts. I swear, it comes up with every design – and it isn’t possible (although I have an idea – more on that tomorrow). What you can do, though, is have a rounded border about the entire web part zone… Read more »

Tags: jQuery, Rounded Corners, Web Part Zones

SharePoint List items all have a Title column (although it’s display name might be changed to something else). This Title column is a string, which is unfortunate as sometimes you really don’t need a string column on a list; this was the need I faced.

You can make a Title column not required:

Also, if you go to the ‘Advanced Settings’ page of your list and ‘Allow management of Content Types’ you can then go into your content types and Hide the Title column. This is okay – but the Title column is still there – it’s just being displayed with “(no title)”… Read more »

Tags: Breadcrumbs, jQuery

So, the case management system I’m working on has a ‘Mailbox’ library. Really, it’s just an email enabled document library, with the address set to the name of the case. Anyway, when emails are received into this list, we’d like to show the subject, sender, cc, to addresses, and so on. It turns out that email enabling a document library does in fact add columns for those properties (but they’re not automatically added to the default view).

Neat! Until you start looking at the code itself – then it sucks… Read more »

Tags: jQuery, Lists, ListView

We’ve got an interesting requirement. We’re using a SharePoint list to store documents which are related to K2 SmartObjects. One of my colleagues is building a custom user control that’s going to show information from this SmartObjects, and associated documents. We want to allow users to

• click to add a document to our smart object entity
• upload a file to a library
• fill in some details
• automatically associate that file by a GUID

Sounds complicated? Actually, it’s not so hard! Read more »

Tags: JavaScript, jQuery, K2, List Forms

I’ve said it before, but not quite so explicitly – it’s easiest to get query string parameters with a regular expression. I keep seeing big JavaScript functions looping through and splitting the parameters up, and that might be fine if you want to store those and use them repeatedly – but if not, regexes are your friend.

This function will the value of a parameter. If the parameter requested isn’t in the query string, it returns null.If the parameter doesn’t have a value (e.g. debug in ...&debug&...) it returns an empty string.

function GetQueryParam(parameter){
var p = escape(unescape(parameter));
var regex = new RegExp("[?&]" + p + "(?:=([^&]*))?","i");
var match = regex.exec(window.location.search);
var value = null;
if( match != null ){
value = match[1];
}
return value;
}

Tags: JavaScript, regex

It’s quite nice that this control is available to use in my own pages/web parts, but there  are issues:

• As Sven De Bont noticed, it ignores regional settings for the SPWeb it is within. Set the Locale in code yourself based on the current SPContext.
• If it’s left blank, it still returns a selected date - today! You have to check the DateTimeControl.isDateEmpty property first, and if it is false then you can use the DateTimeControl.SelectedDate property.
• It has it’s own validation, and doesn’t play nicely with standard ASP.NET validators – but can be made to do so.

Here we have in microcosm my problems with Microsoft and date/times – an assumption of the local region, and date time controls that would never be empty, right? I had exactly these same problems when writing an Outlook 2003 to SharePoint 2007 integration too. Makes me a bit annoyed! Especially as we have nullable types! Quit screwing around with DateTimes being structs, make them objects and just return me a bloody null if nothing has been selected!

Tags: Dates, DateTimeControl, Locale

Something I keep forgetting – the locale code for the UK (en-gb) is 2057. I shouldn’t have to remember that as much as I do, but SharePoint Designer’s Dataview Web Part seems to assume you’re American…

Tags: Dates, Locale

It’s been a mad few weeks, so sorry for the posts tailing off a bit. Anyway, let’s get back into it with an interesting (and fairly short) problem.

ASP.NET applications can have custom error pages for the different HTTP responses. For example, you can have a custom “404 – Page not found”. Now, this can be a good idea, particularly for errors that produce stack traces or provide potentially sensitive information about the workings of your code. Or, heck, maybe you just want to present a nice looking error page. Read more »

Tags: ASP.NET, Error