Setting the Title field for Content Types

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Andy

This is one I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while. I was using a Content Type where I was trying to set the display name of ‘Title’ field. I was happy to have a Title column, but I wanted it to have a different name.

I tried doing this declaratively:

<FieldRef ID="{fa564e0f-0c70-4ab9-b863-0177e6ddd247}" Name="Title" DisplayName="Request" Required="FALSE" />

However, I found this didn’t work in SP2010 – the field still appeared as ‘Title’. This was frustrating.

Instead, I had to set the Title’s display name in code:

foreach (SPFieldLink fldLnk in contentType.FieldLinks)
{
if (fldLnk.Id == SPBuiltInFieldId.Title)
{
fldLnk.DisplayName = "Request";
}
}
contentType.Update(false);

This was a bit strange – other fields can have a DisplayName set in CAML quite happily. This seems to just be a feature of the Title column.

EDIT: I also had to use a similar approach on setting the Title column for a content type used on a list – but using:

private void SetTitleField(SPWeb web, string listname, string contentTypeName, string newTitleName) 
{
SPList list = web.Lists[listname];
SPContentType ct = list.ContentTypes[contentTypeName];

foreach (SPFieldLink fldLnk in ct.FieldLinks)
{
//Necessary to set title field - when using content types, this seems to set it to "Title" irrespective of what is set in the Content type or list's XML.
if (fldLnk.Id == SPBuiltInFieldId.Title)
{
	fldLnk.DisplayName = newTitleName;
	ct.Update(false);
	break;
}
}
foreach (SPField fld in list.Fields)
{
if (fld.Id == SPBuiltInFieldId.Title)
{
	fld.Title = newTitleName;
	fld.Update();
	break;
}
}     
}

Refinements panel and Custom Search Box web parts

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Andy

So I’m doing some work for a customer where they want a custom Search Box web part. Essentially, they want to be able to search by particular managed properties, which is a pretty common scenario:

Naturally, I added this to my search results page, and removed the existing Search Box web part.

During test, the customer noticed that the ‘Show More’ links on the refinement panel had stopped working:

Interesting – although showing some different metadata properties, this was all pretty standard stuff. A bit of a check on Google found this interesting post by Chris Coulson. The short if it is that the Refinements panel uses JavaScript that is loaded by the Search Box web part – so you have to have a Search Box web part on the results page, even if it is hidden. Add that and the Refinement panel works again.

You can hide the web part via the web part properties > Layout > Hidden.

Annoying Exporting a list to Excel

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Andy

SharePoint lists have the ability to export their contents to an Excel Workbook.

This is quite cute – it gives the users a way to get the data out into something they’re familiar with, can manipulate and can print. However, I was having an issue. Using a list based on a Custom List (above), one of my columns (Enquiry) wasn’t exported:

I wondered at first if this was because of it’s column type (Hyperlink), or because I’d created the column programmatically. Then, on a hunch really, I tried changing the column order. I added another column before it in the list view. I used the ID column, but any should work. When I exported the list – all the columns I wanted came through (but the ID column didn’t).

What I think is going on here is that if you used the same export on a document library then typically – though not always – the first column is an icon for the type of file it is. My suspicion is that some muppet, when writing the export to excel, realised that they’d have these icons, and decided to avoid them by excluding the first column. This is unfortunate for two reasons:

Not all lists have icons – witness my Custom List
Not all document libraries have the file icon as the first column.

For now the resolution would be to have another column as the first on your list.

BeforeProperties and AfterProperties

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Andy

I am sick of having to hunt down the link to Synergy’s post on the BeforeProperties and AfterProperties available in different events on SPListItems. For my reference, here it is:

List:

List	BeforeProperties	AfterProperties	properties.ListItem
ItemAdding	No value	New value	Null
ItemAdded	No value	New value	New value
ItemUpdating	No value	Changed value	Original value
ItemUpdated	No value	Changed value	Changed value
ItemDeleting	No value	No value	Original value
ItemDeleted	No value	No value	Null

Document Library:

Library	BeforeProperties	AfterProperties	properties.ListItem
ItemAdding	No value	No value	Null
ItemAdded	No value	No value	New value
ItemUpdating	Original value	Changed value	Original value
ItemUpdated	Original value	Changed value	Changed value
ItemDeleting	No value	No value	Original value
ItemDeleted	No value	No value	Null

Note: Allegedly, this does change if the event receiver is synchronous - the before properties are available. I’ve not checked this out yet.

Obviously, for SharePoint 2007 systems that doesn’t apply – as ‘*ed’ event receivers are always asynchronous.

ContentIterator – Curious Behaviour, and Infinite looping

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Andy

I like the ContentIterator control – it’s a nice way of being able to process a lot of items in SharePoint. However, sometimes it’s behaviour is … strange.

I had been using it to loop over some (but not all) the items in a list. Some changes meant that I was now going to loop over all the items. I had a list with 500 items that I was testing with. My code was:

ContentIterator ci = new ContentIterator("example");
SPQuery qry = new SPQuery();
qry.Query = ContentIterator.ItemEnumerationOrderByNVPField;
ci.ProcessListItems(list,qry, ProcessItem, ProcessItemError);

This would process the first 200 items, over and over. It never reached an end. Hmm. Continue reading →

Delete Event Receiver from a Content Type with Code

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Andy

SharePoint allows you to attach event receivers to content types. That’s pretty handy. Unfortunately, deleting event receivers from those content types is much more hard. Perhaps this is why the Document ID feature fails to remove the content types that it adds. However, here is one possible approach.

SPContentType ctype = site.RootWeb.ContentTypes[SPBuiltInContentTypeId.Document];
if (ctype != null)
{
 if (ctype.EventReceivers != null)
 {
   bool bContinueDelete = true;
   while (bContinueDelete)
   {
     if (ctype.EventReceivers.Count < 1)
     {
       bContinueDelete = false;
     }
     else
     {
     bool bFoundOne = false;
     foreach (SPEventReceiverDefinition d in ctype.EventReceivers)
     {
         //Could match on the Type of the event receiver, but for this example, let's use name
         if (d.Name.Contains("Document ID"))
         {
           d.Delete();
           ctype.Update(true, false);
           bFoundOne = true;
           break;
         }
     }
     if (!bFoundOne)
     {
       bContinueDelete = false;
     }
   }
 }
}

More on why this is important in a later post.

Slow Site Creation in SharePoint 2010

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Andy

I have a development machine that I was creating a number of sites within. I wanted to create about 10,000 sites or so (and have done more than that in testing before without a problem). When I started the process that was creating these running on my machine it was taking about 20 seconds per site. After a mere 2000 sites, it was then talking 30 minutes per site. Something isn’t right.

I did a bit of digging and found that others have had the same problem – but no solution.

I then spoke to one of our administrators, and he suggest clearing out the ‘event cache’ table. I’d never heard of that (and I’ve no idea how he found out about it), but his advice was:

Minimise the amount of rows in the EventCache SQL table:

set ChangeLogRetentionPeriod to 1 day (1.00:00:00) on web application

set EventLogRetentionPeriod to 1 day (1.00:00:00) on web application

set ‘Change Log’ timer job to run daily (default is weekly)

Okay, so I did this using STSADM:

stsadm -o setproperty -pn change-log-retention-period -pv 1 stsadm -o setproperty -pn event-log-retention-period -pv 1

…and I then changed the Change Log timer job’ schedule in central admin, and set it running right away.

The timer job took about 8 minutes to run. That was a surprisingly long time.

When I then tried creating a site, it took 7 minutes. Clearly, this is still an unwell system, but that’s a lot better than 30 minutes. I’ll update if I find more.

Deploy a solution to the sandbox in C#

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Andy

I came across a question on StackOverflow about how to programmatically deploy a sandbox solution, and this seemed a good question. Here’s what I came up with…

Continue reading →

CQWP and Discussions

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Andy

Hmm. Interesting problem – I had a Content Query Web Part (CQWP) that was displaying the Title for Discussions. Unfortunately when you clicked on them, they took you to the display form for the start of the thread, not the entire thing:

Okay, but could I get it to link to a view of the discussion thread itself?