WSPBuilder and CAS Policies

Posted on August 13, 2009 by Andy

Recently I wrote a web part using the WSPBuilder Visual Studio add-ins. I wanted to deploy it to the BIN directory and not have to elevate the trust level of my farm, so I was going to have to write a Code Access Security Policy (CAS Policy).

Others have written good descriptions of what CAS Policy is (here is a good description by Bamboo), but the short description is that it tells your application (SharePoint) to give certain additional rights to an assembly (in our case, the web part). These rights are things like being able to access the disc, the network, or even the SharePoint Object Model!

Yup, that’s right – under default Code Access Security, my assembly wouldn’t even be able to access the SharePoint APIs. Continue reading →

Adding CSS links to your SharePoint pages or code…

Posted on July 20, 2009 by Andy

I love Twitter – you get some though provoking questions on it. Thomas Resing asked the other day:

How are you applying styles to your custom web parts in #SharePoint? using CSSClass property, stuck on deploying css <Link> tag in the head

Well, for pages themselves you have the CSSRegistration control. It’s an ASP.NET control, and looks something like:

<SharePoint:CssRegistration name="/_layouts/myBrand/SomeStyle.css" runat="server"/>

This control registers the URL with the page, but doesn’t emit anything. That’s controlled by the CssLink control:

<Sharepoint:CssLink runat="server" />

It actually outputs the <link> elements, and this means that you can have a CSSRegistration control low down in the page (in a Content control, for example) and you can still output it in the <head> of your page. There’s a good post about this on CleverWorkarounds.

So, could we use that control? Well, we should be able to instantiate one – except it turns out that we don’t have to. We can just use the CSSRegistration.Register() static method – something like:

protected override void CreateChildControls(){ CssRegistration.Register("/_layouts/myBrand/SomeStyle.css"); }

Job done…

Control the RSS Feed Settings on an SPList via the API

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Andy

Tobias Zimmergren tweeted today asking

Anyone got recommendations to how you modify RSS-Settings for an SPList object using the API?

Good question. The SPList object does have a property EnableSyndication that gets or sets whether an RSS feed is available. There is also an property ‘AllowRssFeeds’, but it is, apparently, read only.

So, you can set whether one is allowed or not – but there are a lot more settings. What about controlling them programmatically? Continue reading →

Rounded Corners on Web Parts

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Andy

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 →

Be selective about how you get items from an SPList

Posted on June 24, 2009 by Andy

Just read an interesting article from Waldek Mastykarz called ‘Performance of various methods to retrieve one list item’. It’s well worth a look – go and read it.

So, the interesting thing I took away from it was just how slow the GetItemById() method was compared to an SPQuery. Why? Wouldn’t it make sense to use and SPQuery within the GetItemById() method?

Well a bit of Reflector digging (again) shows that it does! But it isn’t just a query for the item with that Id – it also specifies that the

SPQuery.ViewAttributes = "Scope=\"RecursiveAll\" ModerationType=\"Moderator\" ";

Hmm. So it’s probably a more complicated query. Depending on your solution, you might not need “RecursiveAll” – I try to avoid folders in lists, preferring views to break down my content.

So, the lesson that I took away was that if you are doing a LOT of getting items from lists, it is worth considering how you want to. There isn’t a right answer, unfortunately, and testing is key. The problem is, there are many factors:

Can you use caching?
Do you know the list you’re getting items from?
Are you getting items from more than one list?
Do you have folders?
What other parameters might your query have?

It’s difficult to know, hence I think Waldek is right – give it a test so you have some idea!

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

Posted on June 2, 2009 by Andy

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:

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 →

Filter User Columns by Account

Posted on June 1, 2009 by Andy

I needed to query an SPList by a User column. I wanted to query the list by account (DOMAIN\User) and check that that user existed. Essentially, I’m validating the input of a PeopleEditor control against users in the SPList. Unfortunately, this didn’t look possible – examining my list items through the object model I seemed to get back a value like a lookup field – that is [number;#value]. For example:

1#;John Smith

Not very useful – accounts are unique, but John Smith’s aren’t. I was beginning to feel a bit frantic about not being able to do this sort of query when I found this very useful post by Karthikeyan Kasiviswanathan. The short of it – you have to set the column up to display the account if you want to query by the account.

Sort of makes sense – but is a bit weird too. I mean, isn’t the account the unique bit? Shouldn’t I always be able to query by that? Still, this should work for me.

Webpart Titles not shown in WebPartZone…

Posted on May 29, 2009 by Andy

Curious problem this – I had a web part zone where all web parts being put in it would be displayed without their titles. Didn’t matter if you manually went and turned on the chrome to show a title – that setting never saved, and the web parts didn’t ever have a title.

After tracking through all the page’s code, I found that when I set the WebPartZone’s ID to be ‘Main’ then my web parts ceased functioning correctly; their titles disappeared. If I set the ID back to ‘Left’, then all was fine.

I don’t know why this happens, but certainly using a different ID for my zone fixes it. If anyone knows why this actually happens, please let me know.

Clean up SharePoint’s UI with jQuery

Posted on May 27, 2009 by Andy

So, the case management system I’m working on has a ‘Mailbox’ library. Really, it’s just an email enabled document library, with the address set to the name of the case. Anyway, when emails are received into this list, we’d like to show the subject, sender, cc, to addresses, and so on. It turns out that email enabling a document library does in fact add columns for those properties (but they’re not automatically added to the default view).

Neat! Until you start looking at the code itself – then it sucks… Continue reading →

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Category Archives: Development