Andy Burns’ SharePoint Blog

I’ve been working on a custom field for, well, a while now, and after making some changes I started to get the error “To save to the server, correct the invalid or missing required properties” when trying to edit a document and save the changes back in Word 2007. This was a little strange, as I’d already sorted out hiding the custom field from the document information panel, and things had been working fine since then.

New documents seemed to be alright, but the older ones weren’t. So, maybe the problems were all the old documents, rather than my field.

Eventually, I came across this knowledgebase article – so I “inspected” the document, removed any of it’s custom data, and resaved it – and it worked fine.

What I think happened here was, I was testing different settings for Content Approval and Versioning on my document libraries. I think the troublesome documents were created when one of those was set to be ‘on’, and I subsequently turned it ‘off’. This meant that the document actually had extra data that referred to a column that no longer existed (I think) – which probably means this is related to Content Approval.

But I’d be curious if anyone else has managed to cause this error, and how they did so.

Tags: Content Approval, Document Templates, SPField, Versions

The question came up the other day – what happens if you have a lot of content types attached to a SharePoint list. Say, for example, a hundred? The ‘New’ menu might get a little, um, large. Well, I used the code for programmatically creating a content type from the other day to create and attach lot of content types. Read more »

Tags: Menus

Auditing with SharePoint 2007 is something that I’ve managed to avoid playing with until our current project. Frankly, this has mainly been because the user interface for audit details is inadequate out of the box. Most other systems, you just go to a page, and see what happened to that item.

Anyway now that I’ve started to take a look at it in more detail, I notice a few other minor problems with it… Read more »

Tags: Audit

Okay, so I’ve not been blogging much recently as I have been sidetracked onto exciting deployment tests for the system we’ve been working on. However, I did come across this interesting issue…

Normally, if I were having K2 BlackPearl on the same box as SharePoint, I would install SharePoint first, then K2. This seems to work without much fuss, and is the right way of doing it.

However, this time I had installed K2, and was now trying to install SharePoint (long story). However, SharePoint’s installer kept failing (using the SP2 with cumumlative updates to April, in a slipstream installer). It simply would not complete successfully.

Eventually, we tracked this down to the SQL 2005 Report Viewer. We uninstalled (via ‘Add an Remove Progams’) the ‘Microsoft Report Viewer Redistributable 2005′ program, stopped the K2 BlackPearl service, and tried installing SharePoint again. It worked.

Of course, the idea would be, don’t have the two on the same box. But just in case someone else tries the same thing.

And I hope I’ll get back to development soon.

Tags: K2

So, I thought a little wrap up of what we’ve seen and how I figured all this out. Much of what we’ve looked it is just a simplified version of the standard ‘People and Groups’ pages, and a lot of digging around with reflector was involved!

We’ve seen:

• That listing users is fairly simple using some ‘magic values’, but that supporting the ‘View Selector’ is a bit more complex!
• That resolving the MembershipGroupId GET parameter is important, but pretty simple, and that there are many ways you could choose to do this.
• That adding users is pretty simple too – it’s just the sort of SharePoint API code you’d get asked about in the WSS3 App Dev exam.
• That removing users is a bit yucky – JavaScript to get the IDs of selected users – but again, the code itself is pretty straightforward.

Now the moment you’ve been waiting for – the code for the 3 pages we’ve used itself. Note that I’ve also used a custom Master page for my sites – you’ll want to build your own, with your own navigation, etc..

Tags: People and Groups

The final component in my users and groups UI is the ability to remove users. This is based very much on how SharePoint works – and it’s a little ugly. My apologies -but this is how SharePoint does it.

Our ListView shows our users. Each user has a checkbox next to them:

I’ve added a ‘Remove Users’ LinkButton to my fake ‘toolbar’:

That LinkButton is defined in my page as:

<asp:LinkButton UseSubmitBehavior="false" id="BtnRemoveUsersFromGroup" runat="server"
Text="Remove Users"
OnClick="BtnRemoveUsersFromGroup_Click"
OnClientClick="return BtnRemoveUsersClick();"
/>
So, on click it runs some client script, and then posts back a click event. So, how do you know which users have been selected within the postback? You could have zero-to-N checkboxes! Read more »

Tags: People and Groups, Permissions

So, in the previous posts we’ve looked at how to resolve a MembershipGroupId for a group (or at least, one way of doing so), and how to list users. Now, how do we add new users to our group?

Well, on our ‘list of users’ page, I have what looks like a a SharePoint toolbar. It’s actually just a table cunningly formatted to look like a toolbar, and the ‘Add users’ link on it is a LinkButton. In the codebehind it’s click event is:

protected void BtnAddUsersToGroup_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
int iGroup = (int)ViewState[GROUP];
SPUtility.Redirect("SimpleUG/AddUsers.aspx?MembershipGroupId=" + iGroup, SPRedirectFlags.RelativeToLayoutsPage, this.Context);
}

So, all we’re doing is going to a page called ‘AddUsers’ and passing the MembershipGroupId again. Read more »

Tags: People and Groups, People Picker

So, one of the things I skipped over in my last post was just how you get the MembershipGroupID for the group you want the users to administer. Well, there are lots of options – all you’ve got to do is get to your page with the ListView with the correct value for the GET parameter MembershipGroupId.

If you knew the ID in advance, you could hard code it. I didn’t, so I used a redirect page. Read more »

Tags: People and Groups, Permissions

Listing users in my page was actually the easiest bit of the whole solution. In the ASP of my page, I added:

<SharePoint:ListView id="UserListView" ListID="UserInfo" runat="server"/>

And my page showed:

This is a SharePoint ListView, and the id and ListID appear to be ‘magic’ values. If set as above, the web part will display the users in the group specified by the MembershipGroupId GET parameter for the page. Try it – go to the normal users and groups pages, to to view the members of a group, and try replacing the integer ID of the group. (Not all are used)

So, that bit of magic shows me the list of users. In my page’s OnLoad event I also read the MembershipGroupId parameter and used that to read the name of the group we’re editting, which I then used in the PageTitle area. We’ll see this later.

(My Site is called ‘Blank’ and we’re editing the ‘Blank Members’ group)

That’s all I needed really, but as a bonus I’m also going to describe how I added the View Control. Read more »

Tags: People and Groups

Previously, I’d blogged about a simplified Users and Groups UI for SharePoint. I really annoys me that the standard one is so complex – I’m a techy, and a specialist, and it confuses me! I’m not sure what chance non-specialist admins will have.

The worst part is, though, often users just want to add or remove users from a pretty limited set of groups. I mean, this is implied by the standard ‘Visitors/Members/Owners’ groups on a site. Unfortunately, there are often a lot of other groups, and other complexities shown through the standard user interface in SharePoint.

For a Case Management system we’ve been working on, I built a simplified user interface. The idea was to make it easy for non-techies to add and remove users from specific groups. They weren’t to have access to all groups, and this wasn’t to replace the ordinary People and Groups pages – so more technical staff could still use those too. What I came up with is shown below.

It appears similar, initially – but the navigation on the left is the same as for the rest of our case site. Only the relevant groups (“Case Workers” and “Case Owners”) are linked to on the left, and these links are only shown to users who can edit the groups (Home and Audit aren’t related to people and groups). Also, the menus on this page only let users add or remove users – which is all they should need to do.

Note that the “Case Workers” and “Case Owners” groups are just the groups we happened to be using – you could build this to work for others, depending on your needs.

I built this user interface using 3 application pages put into the _layouts directory. They’re actually Code Behind ASPX pages, and so this is a Visual Studio solution, though some sections of the application could be built in SharePoint Designer.

The pages themselves are for:

• Listing the users and letting admins remove users.
• A page for adding new users.
• A redirect page for identifying the correct ID for the group we want to edit.

The solution is a little complicated, so I’m going to break it down into pieces:

• Introduction
• How to Display a list of users
• How to Find the MembershipGroupId
• How to Add Users
• How to Remove Users
• Conclusion

Tags: People and Groups, Permissions