Andy Burns’ SharePoint Blog

I wrote a feature to deploy a couple of pages into a Pages library on a site. The idea was that these were search pages, and they’d be going into a Search Center. My feature had an Elements manifest of:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<Module Name="CustomSearchPages" Url="Pages" RootWebOnly="FALSE" Path="Pages">
<File Url="advanced.aspx" IgnoreIfAlreadyExists="TRUE" Type="GhostableInLibrary">
</File>
<File Url="contentresults.aspx" IgnoreIfAlreadyExists="TRUE" Type="GhostableInLibrary">
</File>
</Module>
</Elements>

Yet when I activated this on my Search Center, the pages weren’t installed. This was weird, ‘cos I’d done nearly exactly the same thing to install my custom Master page. I began swapping bits of the Master Page feature into my Search Pages feature to see if they worked, which at first they didn’t. Then, by accident, I tried installing my Search Pages on my root site, and they did install.

Interesting.

There followed a bit of wild, stab-in-the-dark guessing. I’d seen lots of examples of installing new page layouts, or installing new master pages. These should all go in the root site (or ‘root web’), and so their Module node would specify RootWebOnly="TRUE". I could find very few results, though, where RootWebOnly="FALSE", which is a little unusual on Google. What if the thing that made a module only install on a root site was the presence of a RootWebOnly attribute, rather than the value of it? I tried:

<Module Name="CustomSearchPages" Url="Pages" Path="Pages">

for my module tag. Well, that’s what it turned out to be. I removed the RootWebOnly="FALSE" attribute, and suddenly my pages would install. I guess I was stupid for trying to be explicit in saying that this feature was not only for the root site. I’ve gotta be honest, that sucks, and it wasted me 4 hours. Clearly, it shouldn’t just be the presence of the attribute; by setting it to False I was saying specifically that the feature was not for root sites only. Someone was shoddy in their processing of the XML.

Tags: Bug, Features

SharePoint master pages are sort of designed to be created in SharePoint Designer. This isn’t much good, though, if you want to redeploy a master page to another or multiple systems. Also, a master page that has been created in SharePoint designer is “Customized” – that is, it is stored in the database rather than as a file on the file system. This makes it a bit slower.

What I wanted to be able to do for a customer was to create a SharePoint feature that would deploy all my physical files, and in such a way that they weren’t customised. Well, I think I’ve done that.

I pretty much followed the gist of this blog entry by Chris O’Brien (his blog is excellent and well worth a read).

You can also get a feel for it by examining the PublishingLayouts feature that comes standard in MOSS. That feature deploys all of the OOB master pages, etc..

In short, the approach is:

• Create design in SharePoint Designer
• Copy and paste master page code to a new aspx file in your feature, with the same name as the file in SharePoint Designer. (Do not just save the file in SharePoint Designer to the file system. It mucks up the links. Copy and Paste the code – just as Chris says to. Guess who forgot?)
• Save all other relevant files to the your feature.
• Create the Feature.xml file
• Create the Elements manifest file. Note that the XML is case sensitive, and the case used in the blog entry above is wrong.
• Make sure that the permissions on the feature folder are correct and inherited by child files and folders.
• Run “stsadm -o installfeature -name featurename”
• Activate feature at site or sitecollection level.

Attached is an example feature that installs a (rubbish) master page I’ve created called ‘Cairngorm’. To install it:

• Unzip the archive
• Copy the CairngormMaster folder to your Features folder in 12 Hive
• Check its permissions
• Run

  stsadm -o installfeature -name CairngormMaster

• Go to the Site Collection Features page, and activate it.

You should now find that you can select the ‘Cairngorm’ master page from the ‘Site Settings > Master Pages’ page. Select it for your master pages, and you should find your pages go a bit black and orange! You can get the dodgy design I came up with here, but please just use as an example – it looks bleedin’ awful.

Tags: Features, Master Pages