Assembly Versioning in SharePoint

Posted on by
Reply

Note: Although quite a lot of this post is about using SVN data in versioning, the idea of using the AssemblyFileVersion works with other systems too

Knowing what version of your code is running is important. Last year I was working on a product where the build process actually put the SVN revision number into a constant in a file – which was then compiled into the assembly – and then the product displayed that version on various configuration pages. This was cool, ‘cos it made it very easy to tie the version of a customer’s code had a problem to a revision in SubVersion. It proved really bloody useful – the number of times that the ‘latest version, which had definitely been installed’ hadn’t been was … surprising. Thus, I promised that I would do similar in my solutions. However, putting the revision number into a file full of constants seemed … untidy. Continue reading →

How many sub-sites can a site have?

Posted on by
6

Last year I was working on a system where we were creating a lot of sites. I mean, tens of thousands of sites, and all within one site collection (they’d all have a few documents and tasks, but not many). Anyway, we were told by a partner’s developer that:

  • A Site Collection’s Root Site could only have 127 subsites before performance issues would start
  • Each of those subsites could have up to 2000 subsites before performance issues would start

This seemed a bit suspicious to me. I had read on MSDN about the capacity boundaries and limits, and knew about the 2000 subsites per site note:

Subsite
2,000 per site view
The interface for enumerating subsites of a given Web site does not perform well as the number of subsites surpasses 2,000. Similarly, the All Site Content page and the Tree View Control performance will decrease significantly as the number of subsites grows.

Okay, that’s fine. And I knew that the limit on the number of Sites per Site Collection is 250,000. But I couldn’t find anything about this ’127′ subsites under the root site thing, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was where the ’127′ value had come from (125 x 2000 = 250,000) as I simply didn’t see why a root site should be any different to any other type of site. Thus, I decided to test it. Continue reading →

SharePoint Search – AuthzInitializeContextFromSid failed

Posted on by
Reply

I’d a really, really weird problem with a customer yesterday. We’d set up their SharePoint search. Indexing seemed to be working correctly, and when I logged in as an administrator, I was getting search results correctly. However, logged in as a normal – though very highly privileged – user my search results were missing! This was some thing of a surprise. It felt like security trimming, but the user was a Site Collection admin, and had Full Control throughout the entire main content web application. Also, we were indexing content off the network file share, and we knew he could access both the SharePoint Content.

However, when he ran a search, he didn’t get any search results. That sucked. I tried another user account – and had the same problem.

Eventually, I looked in the logs and found the following message:

AuthzInitializeContextFromSid failed with ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED. This error indicates that the account under which this process is executing may not have read access to the tokenGroupsGlobalAndUniversal attribute on the querying user’s Active Directory object. Query results which require non-Claims Windows authorization will not be returned to this querying user.

Continue reading →

Why Blank root sites don’t work with the Managed Metadata field

Posted on by
2

Some of my colleagues are consultants who go out and try and design or generate SharePoint systems for customers. Naturally, they like to try and start from a blank starting point – so they use the ‘Blank Site’ template. However, they keep having problems with the Managed Metadata columns in such sites – in short, they don’t work. Continue reading →

Portal Site Connection and Publishing Sites in SharePoint 2010

Posted on by
1

The Portal Site Connection can be a useful way of making your breadcrumbs link to a site collection that is ‘above’ them in the logical architecture of a site. It’s also a good way of navigating out of Search Sites and My Sites – which are kind of navigational black holes.

Unfortunately, they don’t work in Publishing sites. I investigated why. Continue reading →

FAIL: SPCriticalTraceCounter and TraceLevels

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been looking at how to use the SPCriticalTraceCounter class for outputting messages in the Developer Dashboard. I came across a good post about how to do this by Frode Aarebrot, but it left me puzzled – what was the traceLevel integer about? Why wasn’t it an enumeration – like the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.TraceSeverity enum? Why those magic values? What happened if I used a wrong value?

Continue reading →

Hiding a Tab Group from a custom list type in SharePoint 2010′s Ribbon

Posted on by
Reply

I have a custom list definition that I’ve been writing. The ribbon on it looks something like this:

Unfortunately, I don’t want some of the groups shown on this tab. For example, I don’t want any of the ’Connect & Export’ group, or ‘Customize List’ – these things could actually break my solution. So, how to hide?

Initially, I looked at the HideCustomAction Feature element. This what you’d use for hiding links to settings pages, etc., and it seems a natural choice. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow a RegistrationId in the same way that a CustomAction element does – so there was no way to restrict this to my list only. Damn.

Continue reading →

How DisableEventFiring / EventFiringEnabled works

Posted on by
3

I’ve got an event handler on a SharePoint list that’s fairly long running, and this then raised a question in the office – do these settings control event firing for the currently running event handler, or for the entire list?

Very often you see lines of code like this…

this.EventFiringEnabled = false;
item.Update();
this.EventFiringEnabled = true;

… but was this really necessary? Are people worried about events not being handled ‘cos firing is disabled, or is this just a convenient way of tracking whether events are enabled or not? Continue reading →

Hidden fields, and controlling them with the Object Model

Posted on by
1

SharePoint’s fields can be ‘hidden’ or shown, by setting the SPField.Hidden property. That’s great, but sadly it isn’t that simple. You might want a field hidden, but allow administrators, etc., to ‘unhide’ the field. Then again, sometimes you might want your hidden field to be really hidden, and never ‘unhidden’.

That is actually what SharePoint allows. The SPField.Hidden property also relies on a second property ‘CanToggleHidden’. You can see this in the CAML definition of a field. So you could define a field like:

<Field Type="Text" ID="{449cf8bc-88ce-445a-ac55-11ea0cb71fed}" Hidden="TRUE" CanToggleHidden="TRUE" ... >

Okay, that’s fine – that’d give us a field which is hidden, but we can unhide. Note that by default CanToggleHidden is false, and this led to my problem. Continue reading →