Andy Burns’ SharePoint Blog

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

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while – how to programmatically disable page layouts for a site in SharePoint, similar to how you’d do so with the ‘Page Layouts and Site Templates’  page in the site settings. You can also specify what page layouts are allowed, if you are defining your own Site Definition. But someday, maybe you’ll have to do it through code.

I’m pretty sure that I read something that set me going on this, but I’ve lost the link Read more »

Tags: Page Layouts, PublishingWeb

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

Another thing I’d not done through the SharePoint Object Model was create or reply to a Discussion. This sounded a bit more complicated, but I found a helpful post of ‘Common Discussion Operations‘… Read more »

Tags: Discussions, SPUtility

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

SharePoint supports Forms Based Authentication. I suspect this isn’t news to anyone – if nothing else, I’ve posted about articles describing setting it up.

However, what SharePoint doesn’t do is give you a way of administering these users. In those articles about setting it up they all recommend using the Visual Studio ‘Configure Website’ tool. This works, but it isn’t pretty, and I wouldn’t want customers using it!

Now, it is a shame the SharePoint doesn’t have this facility – we’ve got the membership provider framework abstracting the actual storage of user details (SQL database? Active Directory? Flat file? Who cares? It all looks the same through the provider’s interface). Further, the membership provider interface gives you admin functions that you might want – like list, create, delete, update.

Thus, it seems to me that an obvious thing to provide is a user interface for administering the contents of that MembershipProvider. Sadly, it doesn’t. I suppose the problem is that a developer could extend the membership provider interface or something, but it is a pain. I figured that I can’t be the only person suffering this pain, so I decided to check on Codeplex.

(Don’t get me started on the performance of the codeplex site.)

The Community Kit for SharePoint has an FBA management, well, sub-project, I guess. I tried installing it, but soon found myself asking the same question as Wouter Van Vugt – what is the quality of this project? I mean, it installed okay, but I immediately got a NullReferenceException when I tried to use it. Looking into the code, I found some oddities too – like why is the list of users being filtered to those assigned rights to a site? Surely this should just be administered at the site collection level (well, technically, at the web-app level, but they’re usually the same thing)? That just seems an unnecessary complexity. And the Datasource control used for this lacks create, update and delete – so no clever Gridview usage.

There is also another codeplex project – Forms Base Authentication Tools and Utils for SharePoint 2007 – but it’s been in beta for over a year, and has very little activity, so I don’t know what the state of this is.

All of which, ultimately, brings me around to the idea that I’ll have to write my own (though I’m checking to see if Wouter started to do that, as he seems to have come to the same conclusion). And, actually, the crux of it isn’t a SharePoint thing – such a facility would be easy if there was a DataSource control that wrapped the MembershipProvider. I may just write a datasource to do this.

Tags: Forms Auth

A note for myself. The MSDN DVD for April 2007 (Disc 3070.1) with Visual Studio 2005 on it can’t be installed directly from the DVD. The installer asks you to ‘Install Disk 1′, which is unfortunate, as there is no disc 1, and the DVD contains both CDs in different directories on it.

The solution is to copy both CDs to a single directory on the hard disc of the machine, and run the installer from there.

Unfortunately, for some reason my virtual machine won’t let me do that directly – it complains about copying one of the files from the DVD – but I can share a folder on the host, and copy the installation files into the VM via that folder.

Once you’ve copied the files on, though, the ‘pre-filled’ licence key isn’t there anymore. You can get the key by starting installing from the DVD, writing it down, and then using it when you install from the hard disc.

It’s crazy the work-arounds you have to go through sometimes

Tags: Visual Studio

I’ve been working on a project that is a shared plugin to Office 2003. I was writing this in Visual Studio 2005, but for a variety of reasons (not least of which was having a tidier dev environment), I decided to move this onto a convenient VM which happened to have a lot of the things I needed (MOSS, a domain controller, AD, exchange).

Unfortunately, it also had Visual Studio 2008 too. I didn’t think this would be a problem, though, and so I when I opened the project on it for the first time and it asked me to upgrade the project to 2008, I was happy do. I didn’t think there’d be a problem.

Well, during development, there wasn’t. Whenever I went to test my MSI installer, though, I started to have problems. Installation kept failing and I kept getting the error:

Error 1937. An error occurred during the installation of assembly ‘Extensibility,Version=”7.0.3300.0″,Culture=”neutral”,PublicKeyToken=”B03F5F7F11D50A3A”,ProcessorArchitecture=”MSIL”‘. The signature or catalog could not be verified or is not valid. HRESULT: 0×80131045. assembly interface: IAssemblyCacheItem, function: Commit, component: {8C306A7E-AE8E-14F0-4168-C43060985CF4}

This was surprising. Extensibility.dll isn’t one of mine – it’s a Microsoft one that should’ve been in the Primary Interop Assemblies for Office. Anyway, it’s not one of mine, it hadn’t changed, and it was signed correctly. So what gives? Read more »

Tags: Visual Studio