Category Archives: Coding

Getting levels of the SharePoint Heirarchy and their Exceptions

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Something that I have to do time and again is get some element of SharePoint’s heirarchy, such as a site collection, site, list or item. This is pretty typical – that’s why we all use USING to ensure proper disposal of SPSites and SPWebs, right? But what happens if the thing you’re after isn’t there? What exception get’s thrown?

Well, this should be pretty clear:

try
{
    //FileNotFoundException if doesn't exist
    using (SPSite site = new SPSite(siteGuid))
    {
        //FileNotFoundException if doesn't exist
        using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb(webGuid))
        {
            //SPException if doesn't exist
            SPList list = web.Lists[listGuid];

            //ArgumentException if doesn't exist
            SPListItem item = list.GetItemByUniqueId(itemGuid);
        }
    }
}
catch (System.IO.FileNotFoundException fileEx2)
{
    // Site or Site Collection Not Found
}
catch (SPException spEx2)
{
    // List not found
}
catch (ArgumentException argEx2)
{
    // Item not found
}

Hopefully that might prove useful to someone – and a good reminder for me.

Silverlight in SharePoint ‘Hello World’ demo

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I’ve not used Silverlight, and I though it might be interesting to try the Silverlight Web Part from SharePoint 2010, so I came up with a little ‘hello world’ project. Using Silverlight, I wanted to:

  • Query a SharePoint List for data
  • Display that data

Not exactly complicated stuff, but I figured it would be a start. I decided to query a Picture Library, and display the pictures in my web part, changing the displayed image every few seconds. All of this is very achievable with JavaScript or jQuery and the Content Query Web Part (as some sort of variant on the CQTWP I built), so I thought this would be a good comparison. Continue reading →

Make Visual Studio break on all Exceptions

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I’m a big fan of not raising exceptions if possible – rather than throwing and catching ‘expected exceptions’. To me, that phrase is an oxymoron – exceptions should be, um, exceptional, and it can make the wood hard to see for the trees when looking for proper exceptions.

Anyway, that aside – you can make Visual Studio break on any exception, not just the unhandled ones. Use Ctrl-Alt-E to edit – there is supposed to be some way to get to it though the menu, but I’ve not found it. Discovered in a blog post here.

C# Code to send an email

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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);
}

Event Properties AfterProperties – what should they be?

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While working on pre-filling ListItem fields on an item, I became a bit puzzled. The SPItemEventProperties.AfterProperties collection is a dictionary which can contain the named value for one of the fields of the item. In other words, if we wanted to set a value “Tax Area” to “Europe” we’d do:

properties.AfterProperties["Tax Area"] = "Europe";

In our case, however, we didn’t know what these properties were before hand. Rather, we were ‘inheriting’ values from a parent folder. Thus, we were going to use the parent folder’s SPField object for each field to define the value. I started out using:

properties.AfterProperties[parentField.Title] = parentItem[parentField.id];

But is Title the right property to use? Well, having looked through a number of blog posts, this seems to be the subject of some confusion.

At first Title is okay to use. However, you can change the display name of the field. For example, we could change our field’s Title to ‘Tax Region’ – but we still need to use ‘Tax Area’ in our AfterProperties collection.

So, InternalName is the right property of the SPField to use – but there is a hiccup. The InternalName is encoded – Tax_x0020_Area – so you have to unescape it like I’ve talked about before.

The summary is, then, use the unescaped InternalName in your AfterProperties collection.

Programmatically figure out the Email address of a list

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I like mail enabled lists – they’re not perfect, but they are nice, and most folks can handle working email.

Sometimes, though, you want to programmatically create and enable these lists. That’s cool – but how do you figure out the email address of the list afterward?

You can get the first part of the address from the SPList object’s EmailAlias property. But that’s only the bit before the ‘@’ sign – what about the end of the address? Well, you get that from the farm:

emailAlias = list.EmailAlias + "@" + SPFarm.Local.Services.GetValue<SPIncomingEmailService>("").ServerDisplayAddress;

This gets the rest of the address (in my case ‘sharepoint.virtual.local’). Job done.

Rounded Corners on Web Parts

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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? Continue reading →

Rounded Corners on Web Part Zones

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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… Continue reading →

Find the Version and Edition of a SQL instance

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I’ve got a lot of Virtual Machines for development, and that means a lot of SQL installs. They’re not all the same edition, though, or versions, or service packs. It can be a bit confusing knowing which one I’m dealing with. And I can never remember how to find out – so here is the reminder…

capture

So:

select serverproperty('productversion'), serverproperty('productlevel'), serverproperty('edition')

Using jQuery to fix the removal of the Title column of a list

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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:

turn-off-title-requirement

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)”… Continue reading →