Navigation from a ‘My Site’ back to a Site Collection

Posted on November 18, 2008 by Andy

I don’t normally do much with My Sites to be honest – usually I’m building applications, and they’re not usually in My Sites. One of our customers asked me ‘How do users navigate back to the Intranet?’ and I’ve got to admit, I was baffled.

Well, SharePoint’s My Sites have a site-collection setting for ‘Portal Site Collection’. This setting modifies the Global Breadcrumb, and inserts another link there – so you can have a link back to your site-collection.

There a number of issues with that, though… Continue reading →

Calendar and Gantt views have nothing to do with Calendar or Project Lists

Posted on November 5, 2008 by Andy

I know this sounds obvious, but I had a moment of understanding the other day – Calendar views and Gantt views have nothing to do with Calendar lists and Project lists!

They’re just views that happen to use date columns…

So you can configure the relationship between your list columns and the views…

That’s an interesting concept. We can use this with any list! For example, the start and end dates for help desk calls, or for displaying when things happened. Neat! I can’t think why I didn’t realise this before!

Setting a Site Master on a Publishing site breaks Meeting Workspaces

Posted on October 22, 2008 by Andy

So, yesterday I was wondering about custom master pages for Meeting Workspaces. I found that Meeting Workspaces use their own master page (mwsdefault.master), which is referred to in the CustomMasterUrl property of the SPWeb object. As I noted, that sounds a lot like SharePoint publishing sites (i.e. sites with the Publishing Features enabled, like a Publishing Portal or a Collaboration Site).

This rang a bell with one of my colleagues, so he dug out some details. The publishing features let you select a Site Master Page and a System Master Page… Continue reading →

STSADM Error: Object not set set to an instance of an object

Posted on October 20, 2008 by Andy

I’d built a .wsp (Web Solutions Package) for a customer, containing the branding I’ve been working on. However, when they tried the command:

stsadm -o addsolution -filename branding.wsp

they got the error:

Object reference not set to an instance of an object. c:\branding.wsp: The Solution installation failed.

Interesting – works on my machine. They were running the command as the ‘Administrator’ user on the SharePoint system. A bit of digging, though, showed that the problem was due to either:

Not running under a Farm Admin account (which I understand the ‘Administrator’ user was)
Not having rights to the Central Admin Content Database on SQL server.

Well, we tried running the STSADM command as the service account, and that appeared to work. ‘Course, this is all over the phone so I’m not certain what permissions that account has, but it appeared to run.

Adding a SharePoint system to the Vista Start menu…

Posted on September 23, 2008 by Andy

The only thing that I really like about Vista (in a ‘I wouldn’t like to go back to not having this’ way) is the search box in the start menu. To be honest, I’ve stopped clicking to start applications entirely – it works that well.

Well, today, I had a surprise. One of my colleagues asked me to test something for him, and update my Group Policy – so I did:

Then he asked me to search for something in the Vista start menu – and look what I found:

That’s right, a ‘Search SharePoint’ option. Continue reading →

Pages in SharePoint V – Application Pages

Posted on August 18, 2008 by Andy

Application pages are a pain. They exist inside the _layouts directory, and are common to all the files across the farm. This makes them difficult to change, as such changes happen thoughout the system, not just one site or site collection. They’ve also got their own master page – and it’s difficult to change, which often you want to when branding a system. Essentially, you should try not to need a new master page (application pages can be modified by Themes, so that’s one way of branding them).

So what is an application page? Well, it’s a standard ASPX page. They’re usually for site administration type tasks, though there are a number of pages that users are likely to see regularly that are also application pages – such as file upload, the recycle bin and the “View all a site contents” page. Therefore, there is a problem – you can brand up your SharePoint Site, but if a user tries to upload a file they’ll drop out of that branded experience. For example, this example shows a SharePoint Site using a custom Master page (background window), but if you try to upload a document to that site you’ll see a standard upload page (foreground window). If you look in the URL for the upload page, you’ll notice it’s in the _layouts directory:

Like I say, you can change the style of this window through themes, but really that means just changing the colours – changing the structure of the page is much, much harder. Below is an example of changing the Site’s appearance through themes – you can see that this applies to the upload page too.

You shouldn’t change application pages themselves, as they are core to SharePoint and you won’t be supported by Microsoft – but you can add your own, should you want to present your own farm-wide administration pages.

Pages in SharePoint IV – Publishing Pages

Posted on August 15, 2008 by Andy

Publishing pages are specific to MOSS, as they require the publishing features! They’re not in WSS3! A good example of a publishing page is the default.aspx of a Collaboration site – that’s right, although the default page has the same name as for a team site, it is quite different:

Looks pretty much the same though, eh? That’s because it uses the same master page, but we’ll come to that in a bit.

These pages are are stored in a ‘Pages’ library (you can see this highlighted in the URL). They aren’t really like documents though; they’re much more like list items. Basically, these pages are collections of metadata columns. Different pages have different content types, such as the ‘Press Releases’ page type of the Publishing Portal site template. The other pages types that come out of the box are the ‘Article’ and ‘Welcome’ page types of a collaboration site.

These content types have different columns of data. For example, you might have a type of page for ‘Vacancies’, and that might have columns for position, salary, etc.. You might also have a type of page for ‘Products’ which might have columns for part number, cost, stock, etc..

Okay, so I’ve said that these pages are more like collections of metadata – how does this become a web page that you can see and read? Well, each page type has one or more page layouts. Lets have a look at one in SharePoint Designer:

These are kind of like master pages – they define the layout of our metadata columns in an aspx page. In the one shown above there are only 2 metadata columns, which I’ve highlighted – Page Image and Page Content.

Okay, but what about the master page stuff? Well, out page layout the content controls to go into our master page. Confused? It is confusing, so here is a diagram to show this:

Here you can see the page metadata being put into the page layout, which in turn puts content into the master page, which finally generates the output that gets sent to the user.

One advantage of this approach is that you can change between different page layouts for a given publishing page type – for example, you might have ‘Product page with image on left’ and ‘Product page with image on right’ layouts. Changing the page layout does not require editing any of the content.
| Intro | Master Pages | Normal Pages | Publishing Pages | Application Pages | Forms Pages |

Pages in SharePoint III – ‘Normal’ Pages

Posted on August 14, 2008 by Andy

‘Normal’ pages are just ASPX pages. They usually (but don’t have to) use a master page, and we’ll consider them in that way. First let’s look at a good example – the Default.aspx of a Team Site.

Looking at this in SharePoint Designer we see the following:

On the left we see that our page just exists underneath our Team site – it isn’t in a Library or anything. On the right we see SharePoint Designer shows us the master page that the page uses at the top of the page, and what the page would look like. You can see the PlaceHolderMain placeholder is highlighted, and unlike the master page, this one has content. I’ve also circled where the PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb placeholder is, and this is now empty. So where did this content come from?

If an aspx page uses a master page then it says so in it’s code, and it defines a number of content controls. These content controls match up with the placeholder’s in the master page, and define the content to put in there. If we look at the code (don’t panic!):

Here we see the content being defined for the our PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb (the new content is ‘nothing’, and so our breadcrumb is effectively being erased), and our PlaceHolderMain (which contains lots of code for 2 web-part zones, etc.).

So, just to reiterate, a typical page in SharePoint defines content that is put into a master page. The process is something like this:

Pages in SharePoint II – Master Pages

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Andy

Master Pages are actually an ASP.NET 2.0 technology. They allow you to create a page with a number of ‘placeholders’ (there are a lot of these). Below is a view of the default.master page for a team site.

You can see that the master page already has controls for navigation, search, site actions, etc. built in. I’ve also selected one of the placeholders – PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb. These placeholders give locations on the page for other .aspx pages to put content into. For example, the default.aspx page for a Team site puts content into the PlaceHolderMain and PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb placeholders, amongst others – we’ll look at this below. Now, the observant of you will notice that the PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb placeholder shown above already has content – the breadcrumb to the page’s location. A placeholder can define default content, but the page that then uses the master page can override it, and put it’s own content in. For example, in our master page the PlaceholderMain has no content, but this will almost always be overridden.

Master pages normally exist in a Master Page gallery, which is hidden from normal users. You might have many master pages, though you normally only use 1 on each site. By changing the master page you’re using you can make major changes to the layout, look and format of your site.

Andy Burns’ SharePoint Blog

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