Adventures in SPWonderland. - SharePoint

Silverlight 2: Unable to call SharePoint's Web Services

Colin Byrne — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:29:36 GMT

While preparing for the presentation on Silverlight and SharePoint next week I've just discovered that the current Beta 1 of SilverLight 2 is unable to call SharePoint's native webservices.

The technical reason is that the WSDL SharePoint generates includes an asd:any declaration which is translated by the proxy generator as requiring the XmlElement class but Silverlight does not support this class. So you're not able to call GetList or GetListItems in Lists.asmx for instance.

I've posted on the Silverlight forums about this but the reply I got from Yavor Georgiev (Program Manager - Connected Services) was not clear as to whether this is a planned feature for SL 2.

There are a few ways around this which I'll go into in the presentation but none are very pleasant prospects.

There's probably still time to get this feature in v2. The best thing is to let MS know this is an important issue by adding support on the thread. Also worth keeping an eye on the Silverlight Web Services blog.

Presenting SharePoint + Silverlight at the SharePoint UK UserGroup Basingstoke March 27th

Colin Byrne — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:06:22 GMT

I'm really stoked to be presenting at the UK SharePoint user group meeting in Basingstoke on the 27 March about Silverlight and SharePoint.

This presentation will explain what Silverlight is, what the benefits are over standard web development and how Silverlight can be hosted in and integrate with SharePoint.
With few slides and plenty of demos I'll walkthrough the creation of a Silverlight 2.0 video browser application that uses data from SharePoint and then deploy it to SharePoint. I'll also show how a commercial Silverlight 2.0 product for SharePoint is put together.

The other presentations are

Architecting a Highly Available MOSS Farm - by Lewis Baldwin, ICS, Head of Infrastructure and Support

Governance: Protecting your SharePoint Investment by Symon Garfield, ICS, SharePoint Practice Lead

The good folks at ICS solutions are hosting us at their offices in Basingstoke (http://www.icssolutions.co.uk/pages/howtofindus.aspx).

Just post a reply with your full name on this thread http://suguk.org/forums/thread/8918.aspx (registration required)

Sharepoint and Powershell Virtual lab

Colin Byrne — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:12:27 GMT

I forgot to post this before but Microsoft has created a virtual lab based on my blog postings. If you're interested in Powershell and SharePoint its definitely worth checking out

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032346304&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

As noted on Ben Pierce's blog Powershell is now a CER common engineering requirement for all products released in 2009 and beyond, that should mean as Office 14 is due for release in 2009 PowerShell should be a mandatory feature in SharePoint.

Thats good news and a big change as when I'd asked the question about PowerShell support in SharePoint to Mike Fitzmaurice back in February last year the answer was they had no plan to do so.

SharePoint 2007 and Open Protocols

Colin Byrne — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:33:48 GMT

Microsoft has recently pledged to release the documentation of a lot of its up-to-now internal server protocols.

'Microsoft is providing access through open connections to its high-volume products—Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007—so that software developers, business partners and competitors can better interact with these Microsoft products or invent new solutions for customers.'

Obviously the ones getting the most attention are the server SMB interfaces but also of interest in a real geeky way are ones for the Windows Search Service and WebDAV.

What's tweaked my curiosity is that SharePoint 2007 is mentioned on this list. What interfaces are they talking about? Client side protocols like the FrontPage RPC's? Server side ones? Dunno but it could be interesting.

Personally given the time I spent a long time ago extracting data from a corrupt Microsoft MDB in 2k pages I'd like to see the Jet DB format released, just for old times sake.

Kudo's to Microsoft to releasing this information with a much dignity as anyone with their arm twisted up their back by the EU could.

UPDATE:

thanks to Sean Watson for explaining that the SharePoint related Open Protocols are three WebDAV and two FrontPage ones

MS-WDV Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Protocol: Client Extensions

MS-WDVME Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Protocol: Microsoft Extensions

MS-WDVRV World Wide Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) MS-Author-Via Protocol Specification

MC-FPSEWM FrontPage Server Extensions: Website Management Specification

MS-FPSE FrontPage Server Extensions Remote Protocol Specification

for more details about the Microsoft Communications Protocol Program MCPP and the legal status of these documents see http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/intellectualproperty/protocols/mcpp.mspx

The gist of it seems to be that open source projects are free to use this information but commercial products would possibly be subject to licencing and patent requirements depending on what they implemented.

EVO Community Day - June 21st: Microsoft Campus Thames Valley Park Reading

Colin Byrne — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 09:57:30 GMT

I’m presenting at the EVO (Exchange, Vista, Office) Community day next Thursday the 21st June.

I’ll be doing a session that shows how you can use Powershell to read information from Exchange and getting it into SharePoint 2007.
Its really hard to know how to pitch a presentation like this as the mix of experiences is probably going to be wide, from people seeing this stuff for the first time to old hands. Anyway I’m looking forward to it.

The talk will cover some Powershell basics, calling the new Exchange Web Services from PowerShell and why we might still need to use WebDAV(hint Public Folders) and of course how we write to SharePoint.
I'll start posting some of the code samples over the next week.

There’s lots of other sessions including ones from Steve Smith on SharePoint and Richard Siddaway on PowerShell, should be a good one.

Heres the details of the Event:
The Next EVO Community Day - June 21st: Microsoft Campus Thames Valley Park Reading

Event Agenda
09:30 Start
09:30 - 10:00 Keynote
10:00 - 10:25 Introductions to groups (Including LiveMeeting, Longhorn, Virtualisation)
10:25 - 10:55 Vista
10:55 - 11:10 Break
11:10 - 12:40 Office, SharePoint, Groove
12:40 - 13:25 Lunch
13:25 - 14:55 Break-out sessions
14:55 - 15:10 Break
15:10 - 15:40 OCS + UM
15:40 - 16:40 Exchange and PowerShell
16:40 - 16:55 Break
16:55 - 17:30 Q&A

Further agenda information can be found here: http://www.ukusergroups.co.uk/Agenda.html

To sign up and more information: http://www.ukusergroups.co.uk/

Presenting at the UK PowerShell User Group 22 March Meeting

Colin Byrne — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:29:09 GMT

I’m presenting at the next UK PowerShell User Group meeting on March 22nd doing an updated talk around using PowerShell with SharePoint featuring an intro to PowerShell, Demos and roundup with SharePoint/PowerShell gotchas and 'tips and tricks'.

The talk should be be of interest of anyone who might like to talk to a managed API with Powershell.

I’m doing the first talk and Richard Siddaway is doing the second session with a talk on using ActiveDirectory with PowerShell.
If you need an intro to using PowerShell or want or ask more advanced questions this will be a good place to be.

Location:
Memphis Room
Microsoft Building 3
Thames Valley Park
Reading

Registration 18:00
Start 18:30

You need to register for attendance so follow the instructions in this link: http://www.culminisconnections.com/sites/get-psuguk/Lists/Events/DispForm.aspx?ID=2

Hope to see you there.

SharePoint European Conference highlights

Colin Byrne — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 17:59:42 GMT

I've posted a short piece about the SharePoint European conference on the SUGUK blog, reproduced here

SharePoint European Conference

This is the first SharePoint specific conference I’ve been to and I was impressed by the amount of interest shown by the European’s, with over 2000 attendees from 50 countries and with the UK providing around 160 delegates it was very busy, it seems that even MS was taken by surprise at the amount of interest.

The organisation was of a high standard as you’d expect from a conference hotel, lots of staff and lots of food the only omission as Eric Shupps has already mentioned being the lack of free WIFI access and the really slow speed of the paid for one, they were plainly not geared up for a WIFI swarm drain of techies popping open their laptops and trying to surf the web.

Most of the sessions were of a high standard with speakers either from Microsoft or their partners, the only real dud I attended was the business intelligence one which fell completely flat, poor content and speakers meant I ended up walking out something which I never normally do.

Kudo’s to Steve Heaney of Nintex who did 30 minutes of workflow coding in Visual Studio 205 and had it compile and run without errors, I think he was more surprised at this than anyone.

Here’s my take on a couple of sessions that opened my eyes to new features of the Office 2007 suite.

OpenXML

This session by Peter Koen described the OpenXML format of the new Office 2007 programs Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It showed how easy it is to modify existing document using the Packaging API in .Net 3.0 and pointed out how powerful this could be in conjunction with List Events and Workflow. The power of this API is that you do not need to automate any of the Office programs you just deal with the file itself, this is very important in server side code as most SharePoint code tends to be.

A couple of examples, lets say you have a Document library called Draft and one called Confidential, what you would like is for all documents that are placed into these document libraries to have a watermark applied that says either DRAFT or CONFIDENTIAL applied to them. With list events and some fairly simple code this should be pretty easy to do.

Or lets say you have 100’s of documents in various document libraries that you send out to clients on a regular basis and each one has your logo in it along with your company name and details in the footer of each one, lets say you undergo a re-branding exercise or an office move, you are now faced with opening each one of those documents and changing the logo and footer by hand or perhaps automating Word with VBA. With the OpenXML format you can crack open the Docx file and with a few lines of code manipulate the parts of the document you need to, it would also be an order of magnitude faster than calling Word.

The one current hassle is you have to deal with the Word XML directly, there is no API available that maps say a Word object model onto the XML needed but apparently that is on the development timeline.

http://openxmldeveloper.org/default.aspx

Groove

This was a really good session by Mark Ryan of Microsoft, clearly someone who has been there and got the T-shirt.

Groove is a program I’ve ignored up to now but this session makes clear its not something that can be ignored for much longer, it just too useful a program.

Groove supports offline distributed and replicating workspaces containing lists, discussions, files and custom data form. It basically allows you to do offline collaboration in the same way as SharePoint allows online collaboration.

The integration with SharePoint is limited at the moment as it currently only supports offline documents from document libraries with no support for lists, but if the Groove team gives the SharePoint team some ‘love’ this should improve in the next version.

As Groove is new to the Office stable it does not have the .Net/Visual Studio integration that it possibly should have and although you can embed InfoPath forms to create data entry forms Mark recommends to stick with Groove forms for now.

One scenario mentioned was for offline workgroup collaboration on a design project involving images but perhaps the most interesting scenario is crisis management.

Picture this: you have a physical disaster at your main office, lets say a flood, all company VPN and mail communication through the head Office is down, with Groove you could have a nominated person who holds a predefined workspace containing the company contact list along with the disaster recovery plans and checklists, that user can quickly invite other needed parties into the workspace and as long as people have an internet connection they can stay informed and up to date on all activities as the company works through the steps to get back to normal. Even if you don’t use Groove on a day to day basis in a case like this it would be worth its weight in gold.

Definitely check Groove out, http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/groove/default.aspx

Looking forward to the next one, don’t know when it will be but one thing’s for sure they are going to need much bigger venue.

UK SharePoint User Group Meeting March 7th

Colin Byrne — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 17:51:31 GMT

The UK SharePoint User Group meetings are coming thick and fast, the next one is being held on 7th March in Ullesthorpe, Leicestershire.

This should not be missed as it features 3 speakers, Andrew Woodward, Bill English and Todd Bleeker.

I've seen both Bill and Todd speak and its an experience ;-)

Put your name on this thread to signup for the meeting http://suguk.org/forums/2300/ShowThread.aspx#2300

SharePoint/PowerShell 8: The one with the Contact Web Part

Colin Byrne — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 20:17:59 GMT

Following on from the work in my previous post where I set the users Picture property in their profile the next step is to add a Contact Web Part to our imported publishing pages. I’m using the default layout page to add the contact Web Part to, this page has the Web Part Zones underneath the content fields but you could use another layout that has a Web Part zones to the right of the content fields and of course you can use SharePoint Designer to create your own layout formats and embed the Contact control without using code.

This is how our publishing pages will look once we have added the Web Part to each page

An interesting feature of a Publishing page is that it has a contact property where you can assign user details to each page, you can either lookup the user from the picker in which case the page will pull the users details from the profile database or you can type in the details yourself.

The nice thing about the Contact Web Part is that once you have added it to a publishing page it will automatically pull the picture and the users description (if set in the Web Part) that has been assigned to the page from the profile database.

One bad thing about the part is you only get the choice to put the users name left or right not top or bottom.

So on to the code, I need a function that will take a site URL and then set the default Publishing Page’s contact property and then add the Web Part to the page.


#
Function: Add-ContactWebPart
# Description: Adds the Contact User Web Part to a publishing page # Parameters: SiteURL - Server
relative URL of the Area # UserName - UserName
to show as the
contact in domain\user
format # # Requirements: Needs to have the System.Web assembly loaded # function Add-ContactWebPart($SiteURL,
$UserName) { $comment = "Contact
WebPart Added" $site = new-object Microsoft.sharePoint.SPSite($SiteURL)
$web=$site.OpenWeb()
$user= $web.Users.get_item($UserName)
$pubweb = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingWeb]::GetPublishingWeb($web)
$defaultpage=$pubweb.GetPublishingPages()[$pubweb.DefaultPage]
$defaultpage.CheckOut() # Set Contact "Setting
Contact on " + $pubweb.url + " to " + $user.Name
$defaultpage.set_Contact($user) $defaultpage.Update() $webpartmanager=$web.GetLimitedWebPartManager($defaultpage.Url,
[System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.PersonalizationScope]::Shared) $webpart=new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.ContactFieldControl
$webpart.ChromeType=[System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.PartChromeType]::TitleOnly;
$webpart.Title="Page
Contact" $webpart.PicturePosition=[Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.PictureDirection]::Left
$webpart.IsDisplayJobTitle=$true $webpart.IsDisplayPicture=$true $webpartmanager.AddWebPart($webpart, "LeftColumnZone", 0); " Checking
in page" $defaultpage.CheckIn($comment)
# Publish if($defaultpage.listItem.ParentList.EnableMinorVersions -eq
$true -and
$publishingPage.ListItem.File.MinorVersion -ne 0)
{ " Publishing" $defaultpage.listItem.File.Publish($comment)
} # If moderation is being
used handle the approval if ($defaultpage.listItem.ParentList.EnableModeration)
{ $modInformation = $defaultpage.listItem.ModerationInformation " Moderation
on, Current Status: " + $modInformation.Status
# Check for pending
approval if($modInformation.Status -ne
[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPModerationStatusType]::Approved) { " Approving" $defaultpage.ListItem.File.Approve($comment)
} } # Clean up $pubweb.Close() $web.Close() $site.Close() }

In this code we find the SPUser object for the given username and set the Contact property of the PublishingPage to it. We then add the web Part using the new SPLimitedWebPartManager class. Most of the code is concerned with checking the page out and back in and assumes the page is not already checked out.

An interesting line is

$defaultpage=$pubweb.GetPublishingPages()[$pubweb.DefaultPage]

I'm indexing into the collection return by GetPublishingPages because Powershell doesn't support generics in the current version.

UK SharePoint user group meeting

Colin Byrne — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 13:08:50 GMT

Don't forget the SharePoint user group meeting taking place tomorrow Feb 8th at Reading.

'Mr SharePoint community' Lawrence Lui is over from Redmond to take us through the Fab 40 Application Templates and lead a discussion on Office 14.

Sign ups and more detail here: http://suguk.org/forums/1/1901/ShowThread.aspx

SharePoint/PowerShell 7: Put the User in the Picture

Colin Byrne — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 18:24:37 GMT

Now we have the portal setup I want to add a Contact WebPart to each page but before I can do that I have to add a picture for each user I have imported, in order to keep this post a little shorter I’m only going to concentrate on using the UserProfile API’s to set our picture for each user.
(The Contact WebPart is MOSS WebPart that shows a users name and description and optionally their picture)
The field that we are going to set programmatically is accessed on the Users edit profile page as Picture:

Once set this will display the picture on the user profile like this

To do this I need to revisit our User.csv import file and add an extra field that gives the name of the JPG file that holds the users picture.
I’m going to assume that the previous blog post Upload a directory of files in 4 lines has already uploaded the users picture to the SiteCollectionImages picture library, in real life you’d probably use a separate picture library.

Ideally a profile import has occurred after we have added the users to Active Directory and populated the SharePoint profile database.

Now to set the Users Picture property we know to know the Property Name of the Picture Field.
To make this easy to find out here’s the first function for our toolbox Get-SPUserProfileConfigManager.
This function returns a UserProfileConfigManager (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.server.userprofiles.userprofileconfigmanager.aspx), note this is the new class that resides in the Microsoft.Office.Server namespace not the v2 obsolete one that lives in Microsoft.sharePoint.Portal.UserProfiles.
Also ignore the sample currently given in the MSDN documentation above, it won’t work as it uses the old classes where you pass a PortalContext to the constructor whereas the new version of the classes take a ServerContext object.


 #
Function: Get-UserProfileConfigManager
# Description: return a
UserProfileConfigManager object which is used for management
of MOSS User Profiles # Parameters: PortalURL URL for the
Portal Site Collection # # function Get-UserProfileConfigManager([string]$PortalURL)
{ # Need to get a
PortalContext object # as we do not
have a HttpContext we need to source one the hard way $site=new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($PortalURL)
$servercontext=[Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext]::GetContext($site)
$site.Dispose() # clean up # Return the UserProfileConfigManager new-object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileConfigmanager($servercontext)
}

Once we get the UserProfileConfigManager we can call GetProperties and list the internal and display names for each profile property


$cm=get-userprofileconfigmanager "http://sps:2828" $cm.getproperties() | select
name, displayname Name DisplayName ---- ----------- UserProfile_GUID
Id SID SID ADGuid Active Directory Id AccountName Account name FirstName First name
LastName Last name PreferredName Name WorkPhone Work phone Office Office Department
Department Title Title Manager Manager AboutMe About me PersonalSpace Personal site
PictureURL Picture UserName User name QuickLinks Quick links WebSite Web site PublicSiteRedirect
Public site redirect SPS-Dotted-line
Dotted-line
Manager SPS-Peers
Peers SPS-Responsibility
Responsibilities SPS-Skills
Skills SPS-PastProjects
Past projects SPS-Interests
Interests SPS-School
Schools SPS-SipAddress
SIP Address SPS-Birthday
Birthday SPS-MySiteUpgrade
My Site Upgrade SPS-DontSuggestList
Don't Suggest
List  SPS-ProxyAddresses
Proxy addresses SPS-HireDate
Hire date SPS-LastColleagueAdded
Last Colleague Added SPS-OWAUrl
Outlook Web Access URL SPS-ResourceSID
Resource Forest SID SPS-ResourceAccountName
Resource Forest Account Name SPS-MasterAccountName
Master Account Name Assistant Assistant WorkEmail Work e-mail
CellPhone Mobile phone Fax Fax HomePhone Home phone

So from this list I see that I need to set the PictureURL property, to get a UserProfile we first need a UserProfileManager object:


#
Function: Get-SPProfileManager
# Description: Return a UserProfileManager object which is used for accessing
MOSS User Profiles # Parameters: PortalURL URL for the
Portal Site Collection # function Get-SPProfileManager([string]$PortalURL)
{ # Need to get a
PortalContext object # as we do not
have a HttpContext we need to source one the hard way $site=new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($PortalURL)
$servercontext=[Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext]::GetContext($site)
$site.Dispose() # clean up # Return the UserProfileManager new-object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager($servercontext)
}

And then a helper function Get-SPUserProfile to obtain the UserProfile object itself:


#
Function: Get-SPUserProfile
# Description: Return a UserProfile object, this will
be created if it
does not exist # Parameters: PortalURL URL for the
Portal Site Collection # DomainUser UserName in Domain\user
format function Get-SPUserProfile([string]$PortalURL,
[string] $DomainUser)
{ $upm= Get-SPProfileManager([string]$PortalURL) if ($upm.UserExists($DomainUser) -eq
$false) {
$upm.CreateUserProfile($DomainUser) } $upm.GetUserProfile($DomainUser) }

Note that this function will create the UserProfile if it does not already exist.

Now we just need a function that makes it easy to set a single UserProfile property, if you have multiple properties to set it would be best to do them all at once and then call commit.


#
Function: Set-UserProfileProperty
# Description: Sets a property on a User Profile # Parameters: UserName [optional]
UserName in Domain\user
format # PropertyName Property to set #
PropertyValue Property Value to set #
$UserProfile UserProfile object, if using this in a
loop this should
be set # function
Set-UserProfileProperty([string]$UserName,
[string] $PropertyName,
[string] $PropertyValue,
[Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfile] $UserProfile) { # If we are not
passed a UserProfile object then
create it # if ($UserProfile -eq
$null) { $UserProfile = Get-SPUserProfile($UserName)
} $UserProfile[$PropertyName].Value= $PropertyValue
$UserProfile.Commit() }

Note this function can either be called with a pre-created userProfile object or a UserName.

Heres the updated Users.CSV with the Picture Field added at the end


LoginName,
DisplayName, FirstName, LastName, Email, Picture brianb, Brian Ballack, Brian, Ballack,
brianb@contoso.com, cowner10.jpg walterf, Walter French, Walter, French, walterf@contoso.com,
cowner12.jpg

Now a function to tie this all together, it imports the CSV files, locates the user profile by login name and updates the user’s Picture URL:


function
Set-UserPictures([string]
$PortalURL, [string]
$UserFile, [string]
$Domain ) { Import-Csv
$UserFile | foreach-object {
$name=$Domain + "\"
+ $_.LoginName;   $fullURL=$PortalURL + "/" + $_.Picture;
Set-UserProfileProperty
$PortalURL $name "PictureURL" $fullURL
} }

And you can make use of all of the above code by running this command:


Set-UserPictures "http://sps:2828" "users.csv" "contoso"

Ok now we're all set to add the Contact WebPart to each publishing page in the next post.

Spreken zie SharePoint?

Colin Byrne — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 18:12:07 GMT

I just finished finalising the flights and hotels to attend the SharePoint 2007 European Conference in Berlin today when I realised I knew zip about the German language, yes I know the usual German words picked up from films, schnell, bitte etc. but I'd never spoken one single german phrase for real.

Whatever country I go to I try to speak a little of the local language, if nothing else it gives the waiters a laugh, so I needed a quick and easy starters course in German, a little Googling and I found this gem German Podcasts by Stephan Wiesner

This is fantastic, its a series of podcasts where Stephan takes you through a story teaching you German as he goes about a Hans a German progammer who flies into an airport, goes through customs and talks about a conference he's been at!

The story is nicely pitched at the complete beginner and Stephan has produced mp3's, pdfs to accompany and even a video.

The content is also posted at http://www.archive.org which lets you listen on the webpage itself via a Flash plugin.

I wonder can he do a podcast that teaches me how to say: 'What?? you're NOT using PowerShell to script SharePoint?'

MOSS Personal Sites - Sizing up

Colin Byrne — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 16:58:38 GMT

As a follow on from my previous post we can do some neat calculations on the amount of data stored in MOSS personal sites using Powershell.

Using the measure-object CmdLet against the StorageUsedMB property we can calculate the number of personal sites (+1 one as it includes the root site), average size of of each site, smallest, largest and total storage size of all sites.

Again assuming http://sps:20488 is where your personal sites are hosted

PoSH C:\demo> $output=stsadm -o enumsites -url "http://sps:20488"
PoSH C:\demo> $xml=[XML]$output
PoSH C:\demo> $xml.sites.site | measure-object storageusedmb -min -max -sum -average | format-table

Count Average Sum Maximum Minimum Property
----- ------- --- ------- ------- --------
5 0.62 3.1 0.7 0.4 StorageUs...

To get a list of the sites in question with the largest at the top use -descending on the sort CmdLet:

PoSH C:\demo> $xml.sites.site | sort storageusedmb -descending | select url, owner, storageusedMB | format-table

Url                         Owner                    StorageUsedMB
---                         -----                    -------------
http://sps:20488/person... CONTOSO\mike               0.7
http://sps:20488/person... CONTOSO\jeff               0.7
http://sps:20488/person... CONTOSO\administrator      0.7
http://sps:20488           CONTOSO\administrator      0.6
http://sps:20488/person... CONTOSO\brianb             0.4

And if you just want the top 2 offenders us the -first option on the select-object CmdLet

PoSH C:\demo> $xml.sites.site | sort storageusedmb -descending | select url, owner, storageusedMB -first 2 | format-table

Url Owner StorageUsedMB
--- ----- -------------
http://sps:20488/person... CONTOSO\mike 0.7
http://sps:20488/person... CONTOSO\jeff 0.7

< P> Obviously in real life those figures would be a lot larger!

MOSS Personal Sites – Still Top Level

Colin Byrne — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 16:40:58 GMT

A point came up at the UK SharePoint User Group Chrismas drink, about Personal sites and whether they were top level sites i.e they exist as records in the Sites table and are the top level container for all its subwebs, I hadn’t checked this in v3 so a quick check with PowerShell and stsadm confirms that this is still the case as in V2

Assuming http://sps:20488 is where your personal sites are hosted calling stsadm -o enumsites and processing the returned XML in PowerShell gives us

PoSH C:\demo> $output=stsadm -o enumsites -url "http://sps:20488"
PoSH C:\demo> $xml=[XML]$output
PoSH C:\demo> $xml.sites.site

Url : http://sps:20488
Owner : CONTOSO\administrator
ContentDatabase : WSS_Content_11fba01f-f0c4-4a05-a3c3-868499fd31ce
StorageUsedMB : 0.6
StorageWarningMB : 0
StorageMaxMB : 0

Url : http://sps:20488/personal/administrator
Owner : CONTOSO\administrator
ContentDatabase : WSS_Content_11fba01f-f0c4-4a05-a3c3-868499fd31ce
StorageUsedMB : 0.7
StorageWarningMB : 80
StorageMaxMB : 100
Etc…

Tiding up the output a little

PoSH C:\demo> $xml.sites.site | select url, owner

Url Owner
--- -----
http://sps:20488                           CONTOSO\administrator
http://sps:20488/personal/administrator    CONTOSO\administrator
http://sps:20488/personal/brianb           CONTOSO\brianb
http://sps:20488/personal/jeff             CONTOSO\jeff
http://sps:20488/personal/mike             CONTOSO\mike
….

Fitz is blogging but Maurice is leaving

Colin Byrne — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 15:34:24 GMT

Yes...Fitz is blogging again. At last Mike Fitzmaurice one of the primary links between the SharePoint team and the outside world is blogging again.

No...Maurice Prather one of the few hardcore SharePoint bloggers around has posted that he is leaving the SharePoint team. That's a real loss, overall compared to say the PowerShell team the state of blogging from the SharePoint team has been really poor over the last year, but as blogs come second best to shipping a product out the door perhaps that's understandable, hopefully things will improve once the RTM celebrations have finished.

SharePoint/PowerShell 3: Now add the users to SharePoint

Colin Byrne — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 20:05:34 GMT

Ok now we have the users in AD we can add them to the portal. Again we can use import-csv to add them from the users CSV file

heres the routine

# Function:         Add-UsersToSP
# Description:        Add each user in the import CSV file to the given role
# Parameters:        SiteCollectionURL     URL for the root of the Site Collection
#            UserFile         Location of the CSV file containing the users
#            Domain            Users domain
#            Role             Name of the SharePoint Role e.g Reader, Contribute
#
function Add-UsersToSP([string]$SiteCollectionURL,[string]$UserFile, [string]$Domain, [string]$Role)
{
Import-Csv $UserFile | foreach-object {$spsite=new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($SiteCollectionURL) } {$spsite.RootWeb.Roles[$Role].AddUser($Domain + "\" + $_.LoginName, $_.Email, $_.DisplayName, "") }
}

In this script we get a SPSite object, get its rootweb and index into the roles collection to return the role we want. We then use the AddUser method to add the user.>

And we call it like this Add-UsersToSP "http://sps:2828" "users.csv" "contoso" "contribute"

Now there is something a little different going on in this script. In the foreach-object loop there are 2 scriptblocks (the curly braces). This is because you can have up to 3 scriptblocks in the foreach clause: Begin, Process and End

The Begin scriptblock will be called once at the start of the iteration, Process is called for each object in the collection and End will be called at yes the end of the iteration allowing you to clean up your objects. I don't have an end in this case but you could call dispose on the SPSite object.

In v3 the Roles collection is deprecated and you should start using the new SPRoleDefinition and SPRoleAssignment classes. These new classes have full support for the new security features but for now I'm keeping things as simple as I can.

Now is a good time to point out how easy it is to explore the SharePoint OM interactively, in this case the Roles collection.

First of all from the command line do this

PS C:\demo> $spsite=new-object microsoft.sharepoint.spsite("http://sps:2828")
PS C:\demo> $spsite.rootweb.roles

this produces a listing like this

Name : Full Control
Users : {}
Groups : {SUGUK Intranet Owners}
Type : Administrator
Description : Has full control.
Xml : <Role ID="1073741829" Name="Full Control" Description="Has ful
l control." Type="5" />
ID : 1073741829
PermissionMask : FullMask
ParentWeb : SUGUK Intranet

Name : Design
Users : {}
Groups : {Designers}
Type : WebDesigner
Description : Can view, add, update, delete, approve, and customize.
Xml : <Role ID="1073741828" Name="Design" Description="Can view, add
, update, delete, approve, and customize." Type="4" />
ID : 1073741828
PermissionMask : 1012866047
ParentWeb : SUGUK Intranet

.....

You can use the select CmdLet to produce a simple table listing

PS C:\demo> $spsite.rootweb.roles | select name, users

Name                                    Users
----                                    -----
Full Control                            {}
Design                                  {}
Manage Hierarchy                   {}
Approve                                {}
Contribute                             {Brian Ballack, Walter French}
Read                                    {}
Restricted Read                      {}
Limited Access                       {NT AUTHORITY\authenticated users, S...
View Only                              {}

If we want to see the full object of say the RootWeb you can do this

PS C:\demo> $spsite.rootweb | get-member

or just its properties

PS C:\demo> $spsite.rootweb | get-member -membertype property

or just its methods

PS C:\demo> $spsite.rootweb | get-member -membertype methods

I find myself using this lot before coding C# against an object as I can try out the API and mess around with it before running up VS2005

The next step will be to create a host of portal areas as defined in a CSV file.

SharePoint/PowerShell 2: Add some Users to Active Directory, maybe 1, maybe 500

Colin Byrne — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 09:13:15 GMT

Step 2 in our series is to add some users to Active Directory.

First we need a simple routine to add users to Active Directory

Update 3-11-2006 : The original add-aduser would only work in versions of PowerShell pre RC2. RC2 included some breaking changes to how the DirectoryEntry object handled. I;ve added an RC2 compatible routine.

Pre RC2 version

function add-aduser([string]$LoginName, [string]$DisplayName, [string]$FirstName, [string]$LastName)
{

    $cn=$LoginName
    $sam=$LoginName
    $pw="P@ssword1"

    $ad= new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry
    $u = $ad.get_Children().Find("CN=Users")
    $NewUser = $u.get_Children().add("CN=$cn",'User')


    $NewUser.InvokeSet("sAMAccountName",$sam)
    $NewUser.InvokeSet("displayName",$DisplayName)
    $NewUser.InvokeSet("FirstName",$FirstName)
    $NewUser.InvokeSet("LastName",$LastName)

    $NewUser.CommitChanges()

    $ad=new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry
    $u = $ad.get_Children().Find("CN=Users")

    $NewUser= $u.get_Children().Find("CN=$cn");
    $NewUser.Invoke("SetPassword",$pw)
    $NewUser.InvokeSet("AccountDisabled",$false)

    # set that the password never expires
    $NewUser.userAccountControl[0] = $NewUser.userAccountControl[0] -bor (65536)

    $NewUser.CommitChanges()

}

RC2 Version

function add-aduser([string]$LoginName, [string]$DisplayName, [string]$FirstName, [string]$LastName)

{

   $cn=$LoginName
   $sam=$LoginName
   $pw="P@ssword1"

   # Get an ADSI object for the default domain
   $ad= [ADSI]""

   # Get the Users OU as default
   $ou = $ad.psbase.Children.Find("CN=Users")

   # Add the user
   $NewUser = $ou.psbase.Children.Add("CN=$cn",'User')

   # Set the basic properties
   $NewUser.Put("sAMAccountName",$sam)
   $NewUser.Put("displayName",$DisplayName)
   $NewUser.Put("givenname",$FirstName)
   $NewUser.Put("sn",$LastName)

   # Commit changes
   $NewUser.SetInfo()


   # Set our password
   $NewUser.psbase.Invoke("SetPassword",$pw)

   # And enable the account
   $NewUser.psbase.InvokeSet("AccountDisabled",$false)

   # set that the password never expires
   $NewUser.userAccountControl[0] = $NewUser.userAccountControl[0] -bor (65536)

   # Commit changes
   $NewUser.SetInfo()

}

This gets us a function we can call to add test users. Note we're hardcoding the OU to users, to make this more production you'd want to parameterize the OU, passwords and set the AccountControl flags to Change Password on next login, there's a lot of other resources out there to help with that.

So If we put that in a script file loaded from our Profile we can call it like this

add-aduser "joeb" "joe blogs" "joe" "blogs"

That's nice but with PowerShell we can do better. We really want to data drive this and the built-in import-csv function will parse a CSV and create a collection of objects that match the CSV schema.

Take a simple User's CSV file like this

LoginName, DisplayName, FirstName, LastName, Email

brianb, Brian Ballack, Brian, Ballack, brianb
walterf, Walter French, Walter, French, walterf

Now if we run an import-xml command on the CSV file this is the output

Each line has been parsed and an object created. To see this more clearly we can use the get-member command to reflect over the object and see what the object looks like.

(Note: it will be PSCustomObject not MshCustomObject in post RC0 builds , I'm running Exchange 2007 on this VPC which requires PowerShell RC0)

As you can see the CSV columns have been added as a NoteProperty property (this is part of the extensible type system).

So now we can create a really simple function to import a CSV file of users, pipe the output to a foreach loop and add each user to Active Directory.

# Function:         Import-Users
# Description:        Create users in active directory as listed in the import CSV file
# Parameters:        UserFile         Location of the CSV file containing the users
#
function Import-Users([string]$UserFile)
{
    Import-Csv $UserFile | foreach-object { add-aduser $_.LoginName $_.DisplayName $_.FirstName $_.LastName }
}

Note that when you receiving a collection of objects in the pipeline in a scriptblock you have to loop over each object. The $_ is a special variable that gives you the current object in the loop which you can use to access properties and methods.

To call we just do

Import-Users Users.CSV

With this power 500 users are as easy as 1 user.

We're not limited to just using CSV files, I've just picked that format as I'm always amazed at the amount of data I get given in Excel spreadsheets and word documents and CSV is the easiest intermediate format to work with. There is also an import-xml command which we will use later to import an XML file containing portal content. As Powershell can call any .Net library the System.Data set of classes could also be used to pull information from databases.

The next entry will be adding our users to SharePoint.

Presention Slides and PowerShell code from UK SharePoint User Group Thursday 26'th October

Colin Byrne — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 10:53:00 GMT

Hi,

Just like to thank all those who attended the Presentation last Thursday on controlling SharePoint with PowerShell and Extending the Administration Object model.

I know it was pretty fast paced and technical so I plan to follow it up with a series of blogs entries recapping the steps and scripts in greater detail.

Some of the topics covered were:

Powershell Basics

Exchange produces PowerShell samples from the new UI console

Creating a new SharePoint WebApplication and applying a portal template

Adding users defined in a CSV file to Active Directory

Adding those users defined in a CSV file to SharePoint roles

Adding in webs as defined in a CSV file

Adding content in an XML file to a Publishing Web

Uploading a directory of files in 4 lines of Script.

Creating a custom STSAdm command

Creating an application to sync User Profile properties back to Active Directory

I've attached the PowerShell scripts and PowerPoint Slides.

I'm not able to post the sample code of the AD Sync application as parts of the code is proprietary but I will post a sample application that does a scheduled backup using exactly the same template.

Presentation-SPPowerShell.zip (46.78 KB)

Colin Byrne

Flexnet Consultants

SharePoint/Powershell Quickie: Upload a directory of files in 4 lines

Colin Byrne — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 10:03:35 GMT

A quickie.

Heres 4 lines of code to upload a whole directory of files, in this case pictures, to a SharePoint document or image library.

The directory pictures contains the images.

The destination is the image library SiteCollectionImages for the portal running on port 2828

$wc = new-object System.Net.WebClient
$wc.Credentials = [System.Net.CredentialCache]::DefaultCredentials
function getdestname($filename){ "http://sps:2828/sitecollectionimages/" + $(split-path -leaf $filename)}
dir "pictures" | % { $uploadname=getdestname $_; $wc.UploadFile($uploadname,"PUT", $_.FullName) }

Have I mentioned PowerShell just rocks?

SharePoint/PowerShell 1: Make me a portal

Colin Byrne — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:46:17 GMT

In this PowerShell and SharePoint series I'd thought I'd spin through, in order of use, the commands used to create the demo Portal site in the SUGUK user group presentation.

First step: Creating a Web Application using the API.

The new SPWebApplicationBuilder object makes this easy. This object creates a Web Application using a default port and the default settings, you can override any settings you like in your script but for simplicity I'm just changing the default timezone.

SPWebApplicationBuilder also creates an AppPool to go along with the new IIS Website which has Network Service as the user. In Beta 2TR that account doesn't have the correct permissions so you need to change it to a local administrator. I tend to dev on a Virtual machine DC so I'd use the domain admin.

So we have three routines

new-SpWebApplication - Create the IIS Website and SharePoint settings

set-apidentity - set the Application Pool credentials

get-defaulttimezoneid - returns the Greenwich Meantime TimeZone ID (adjust this one to suit)

We also then need to create the set of webs that will live inside the Web Application, this is done by calling the Add Method on the Sites method of the Web Application passing it various parameters the most important of which is the template ID, in this case SPSPORTAL to give us the default SharePoint Intranet portal look.

The Powershell commands to tie all this together are

$webapp=new-SPWebApplication

set-apIdentity "http://sps:yourportnumber" "contoso\administrator" "password"

#Create Portal Site Collection

$webapp.Sites.Add("/", "SUGUK Intranet","SUGUK Intranet",1033, "SPSPORTAL", "contoso\administrator", "administrator", "administrator@contoso.com")

Here's new-SPWebApplication

# Function:         new-SPWebApplication
# Description:        Create and return a new SPWebApplication object
#             Use the default values which will create the web site at a random port
# Parameters:        none
#
function new-SPWebApplication()
{

    # Get our local SPFarm object
    $spfarm = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPfarm]::Local

    # Use the new SPWebApplicationBuilder
    $appbuilder= new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplicationBuilder $spfarm

    # Create Web Application with the default settings

    $webapplication = $appbuilder.Create()

    # Set the timezone to Greenwich Mean Time
    $timezone=get-defaulttimezoneid
    $webapplication.DefaultTimeZone = $timezone.ID
    $webapplication.Update()

    # Actually queue the application for creation
    $webapplication.Provision()

    # return the SPWebApplication object
    $webapplication

}

# Return the Default TimeZone as used for the majority of our sites
#
function get-defaulttimezoneid
{
[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPregionalSettings]::Globaltimezones | where-object { $_.Description -like "*greenwich*" }
}

Now to change the Credentials for the AppPool is also really simple in V3. The SPWebApplication object exposes a ApplicationPool property which you can use to set its credentials

# Function:         set-apidentity
# Description:        Set the credentials for the application pool for the given Web Application
# Parameters:        Url        Site Collection URL
#            UserName     UserName
#            Password     Password
function set-apidentity([string]$SiteCollectionURL, [string]$UserName, [string]$Password)
{


    $webapp=get-spwebapplication $SiteCollectionURL


    $webapp.ApplicationPool.CurrentIdentityType= [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.IdentityType]::SpecificUser
    $webapp.ApplicationPool.UserName= $Username
    $webapp.ApplicationPool.Password= $Password

    # Save the settings
    $webapp.ApplicationPool.Update()

    # Roll the settings out via a Admin Job
    $webapp.ApplicationPool.Provision()

}

To me this is way easier than using the UI.

PowerShell and SharePoint - Oh Yes

Colin Byrne — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 10:01:53 GMT

Hi,

I'm about to start off a new series of entries about using Powershell to control SharePoint. There's a big gap in the ability to script SharePoint between stsadm commands and custom .net programs and PowerShell fills it nicely.

All my entries from now on will focus on SharePoint version 3.

PowerShell is 'DOS for the .NET generation' (c) :-) and its a fantastic way to both interactively control SharePoint via its Object Model from a command line and to create scripts that can be run in a batch. Its currently at version RC2 and is available from here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925228
It installs as a windows update package rather than a separate install as it used to in earlier betas, thats a sign of its being a core element of Windows going forward.

Ok lets do some Powershell SharePoint basics.

First although Powershell can call any .net class the assembly must be loaded first.
By default Powershell loads a small list of assemblies, this command will get the list of loaded assemblies:

[System.AppDomain]::CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies()

The syntax for calling a .NET class's static method is for the brackets go around the Class name and the double colon between the class and the static method

The output from that is a little hard to read lets just list the files involved

[AppDomain]::CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies() | foreach-object { split-path $_.Location -leaf } | sort

Here's the list of files the above command gives on my machine

Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Management.dll
Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Utility.dll
Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Utility.resources.dll
Microsoft.PowerShell.ConsoleHost.dll
Microsoft.PowerShell.ConsoleHost.resources.dll
Microsoft.PowerShell.Security.dll
Microsoft.PowerShell.Security.resources.dll
mscorlib.dll
System.Configuration.Install.dll
System.Data.dll
System.DirectoryServices.dll
System.dll
System.Management.Automation.dll
System.Management.Automation.resources.dll
System.Management.dll
System.ServiceProcess.dll
System.Xml.dll

As you can see SharePoint is not one of those in the list, also missing that could be useful is the System.Web assembly

There are a few ways to load an assembly onto your AppDomain but the easiest is to call the static method LoadWithPartialName on the Assembly class.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")

LoadWithPartialName is great because you dont need to specify the full name to the assembly which in SharePoint v3 would be

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load("Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c")

and for MOSS

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load("Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c")

Now a lot of people will cry LoadWithPartialName has been deprecated as MS have got concerned how it has to make to many guesses over locating the assembly.
Personally I want to see a method that will simply load the latest version of the assembly I've told it to load, in a controlled environment like a SharePoint server thats exactly the behaviour I want to see. <rant> MS for god's sake just document the method properly and let devs choose whether to use it or not. </rant>

Anyway if you want to use the Load method take a look at this blog entry: http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/HowDoIEasilyLoadAssembliesWhenLoadWithPartialNameHasBeenDeprecated.aspx

Now you don't want to type the load commands each time so put them in your Powershell Profile script.
This changes location a lot depending on which version of Powershell your running so see this entry for the full details http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/TheStoryBehindTheNamingAndLocationOfPowerShellProfiles.aspx

So now what can we do with this?

Well first lets get a site collection we can play with

First create an SPSite object and pass it a valid site url

$spsite= Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://portal.contoso.com")

to see the contents of the object just type the object on the command line

$spsite

To just get a list of the methods on the SPSite object

$spsite | get-member -membertype method

To just get a list of the properties on the SPSite object

$spsite | get-member -membertype property

To get a list of all sub sites

$spsite.AllWebs

Get a list of webs ordered by the last time that the contents have been changed

$spsite.allwebs | select LastItemModifiedDate, URL , Created | sort LastItemModifiedDate

There's lots more that you can do and I'll post them as I go.

Presenting at the SUGUK Meeting 26th October

Colin Byrne — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 08:37:47 GMT

Whoa, its been a while since I've blogged but sundry projects and SharePoint v3 has taken up all my time.

Just to let you know that I'm presenting at the UK SharePoint users group meeting this Thursday the 26th October.

I'm doing 2 sessions; one on using Powershell with SharePoint v3 in which I'll go through Powershell basics and how to use it to control SharePoint. Then I will attempt to build a portal without touching any settings in the UI! Wish me luck.

The second one will explore the new extensible admin object model.
This will demonstrate creating custom stsadm commands along with creating an application that syncs changed MOSS User profile information back to Active Directory.
It will be a small application integrated into SharePoint and built using the new SPService, SPServiceInstance and SPJobDefinition classes.
I'll be describing how they work together, its cool stuff.

Everybody is welcome (you just need to register on the suguk site) so if you are in London this Thursday it would be great to see you. The meeting kicks off at 6.30pm

If you plan to attend just register on the SUGUK site and leave your name on this list
http://suguk.org/forums/thread/1490.aspx

cheers,
Colin

New Free Web Part: Flash Dynamic PhotoGrid

Colin Byrne — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 17:49:45 GMT

Flexnet Consultants have just released a brand new free Web Part.

The PhotoGrid WebPart will show a nXn grid of Picture Library images with a each image randomly chosen to be enlarged. This is similar to the Flikr Photobadge.

You can set the number of pictures on each row and the number of rows along with the time the enlarged picture is displayed (Display time).

Our Web Parts page uses a Flash embedded demo to show you how it would look.

http://www.flexnetconsult.co.uk/WebParts/WebParts.htm

Flash Slideshow Web Part Version 1.2 released

Colin Byrne — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 17:43:48 GMT

Version 1.2 of our free Flash Slideshow Web Part is released.

The Slideshow Web Part will show a rotating display of all the pictures in the Picture Library with an adjustable fade transition between each picture.

This version has better support for SharePoint sites running on non standard http ports.

It now also supports all the image formats that the Picture Library does.

http://www.flexnetconsult.co.uk/WebParts/WebParts.htm

Client Side: Who am I?

Colin Byrne — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 15:43:59 GMT

Sometimes when working in client-side javascript you'd like to know your Windows username for instance to add to the root Outlook Web Access URL for say a contacts search i.e. http://flexnetowa/exchange/colinb/contacts/?cmd=search

Now the stock answer whenever this comes up in the SharePoint newsgroups is: it can't be done, use server side code to render it out.

Thats fair enough and easy to do, I've created a WebPart that stores a users details as a JavaScript object so it can be referenced in code. But what if I don't want to install yet another server-side Web Part.

In the interests of providing code you won't get anywhere else here's the tip.

Now its true the SharePoint Web Services provide no method to tell you who you are (side-note: I suspect you may be able to do this by creating a CAML query against the userinfo table but I've not managed to get that working) but you can get your username by using the FrontPage RPC and calling author.dll, this is how Word displays who you are on its TaskPane when you open a Word document in a document library.

When you call the author.dll ISAPI DLL with the 'open service' method name it returns a host of information about the server and the services it provides.

I'm using the XmlHttpRequest object again which despite the name can also be used to retrieve a text document not just an XML one.

heres the returned information

<html><head><title>vermeer RPC packet</title></head>
<body>
<p>method=open service:6.0.2.6356
<p>service=
<ul>
<li>service_name=
<li>meta_info=
<ul>
<li>vti_defaultlanguage
<li>SW|en-us
<li>vti_usernames
<li>VR|
<li>vti_servercharsets
<li>VX|windows-1257 big5 windows-1252 windows-874 utf-8 windows-1251 windows-1256 euc-kr gb2312 windows-1253 windows-1258 koi8-r iso-8859-1 gb18030 iso-2022-jp ks_c_5601-1987 windows-1250 windows-1255 us-ascii euc-jp unicode unicodeFFFE windows-1254 iso-8859-2 iso-8859-15 shift_jis
<li>vti_scnoprompt
<li>IX|1
<li>vti_toolpaneurl
<li>SX|http://sharepoint.flexnet.ds/_layouts/1033/toolpane.aspx
<li>vti_assemblyversion
<li>SX|Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=11.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c
<li>vti_webtemplate
<li>IR|1
<li>vti_hasonetlayoutfiles
<li>BR|true
<li>vti_navbuttonnextlabel
<li>SR|Next
<li>vti_casesensitiveurls
<li>IX|0
<li>vti_htmlextensions
<li>SX|.html.htm.shtml.shtm.stm.htt.htx.asp.aspx.alx.asa.hta.htc.jsp.cfm.odc.dwt.php.phtml.php2.php3.php4.
<li>vti_approvallevels
<li>VR|Approved Denied Pending\ Review
<li>vti_themedefault
<li>SR|none
<li>vti_welcomenames
<li>VX|default.htm default.aspx
<li>vti_servertz
<li>SX|+0100
<li>vti_adminurl
<li>SX|http://sharepoint.flexnet.ds/_layouts/1033/settings.aspx
<li>vti_showhiddenpages
<li>IW|1
<li>vti_categories
<li>VR|Business Competition Expense\ Report Goals/Objectives Ideas In\ Process Miscellaneous Planning Schedule Travel VIP Waiting
<li>vti_featurelist
<li>VX|vti_RulesScript vti_ServerIndexServer vti_TimedDocEvents vti_ServiceMarkUrlDirExec vti_DocSaveToDB vti_ServiceMarkUrlDirBrowse vti_ACAll vti_ServerODBC vti_ServerASP vti_ServiceMarkUrlDirScript
<li>vti_hasfulltextsearch
<li>IX|1
<li>vti_defaultcharset
<li>SR|windows-1252
<li>vti_navbuttonuplabel
<li>SR|Up
<li>vti_httpdversion
<li>SX|Microsoft-IIS/6.0
<li>vti_serverlanguages
<li>VX|en-us
<li>vti_sourcecontrolproject
<li>SX|<STS-based Locking>
<li>vti_doclibwebviewenabled
<li>IX|1
<li>vti_extenderversion
<li>SR|6.0.2.6361
<li>vti_ignorekeyboard
<li>IR|0
<li>vti_navbuttonprevlabel
<li>SR|Back
<li>vti_longfilenames
<li>IX|1
<li>vti_sourcecontrolsystem
<li>SX|lw
<li>vti_username
<li>SX|FLEXNET\colinb
<li>vti_navbuttonhomelabel
<li>SR|Home
<li>vti_sourcecontrolcookie
<li>SX|fp_internal
<li>vti_sitecollectionurl
<li>SX|/
<li>vti_language
<li>IR|1033
</ul>
</ul>
</body>
</html>

Notice my windows username is listed against the vti_username item.

Using the XmlHttpRequest object to call author.dll synchronously (we're going to wait for the call to return)

xmlrequest = "method=open service:6.0.2.6356&service_name=";

if (!xmlhttp) xmlhttp=GetHTTPObject();

xmlhttp.open("POST", "/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.dll ",false);
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-Type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("X-Vermeer-Content-Type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded");

xmlhttp.send(xmlrequest);

The responseText property on xmlhttp contains the returned document.

The hardest bit is parsing the result to extract the username.

Once that is done I show the username in a DIV element.

So the next time someone asks this question we'll be able to give them some options.

ClientSideUsername.dwp (2.92 KB)

Cross-Browser AJAX for SharePoint Lists Part 2

Colin Byrne — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 14:55:49 GMT

In part 1 we have got to the point where we have called the SharePoint lists.asmx Web Service and retrieved the list of all Lists on our SharePoint site.
We now need to filter down to only those lists that are based on the links list template, this is template type 103, we can use an Xpath expression to filter the items.

// Filter for the Links lists items
links_lists=ajaxsp_GetSoapResponseItems(xmlhttpLists.responseXML, "//sp:List[@ServerTemplate='" + ListTemplate + "']", moz_NSResolver1 );

We loop through the list items and use the getAttribute of the XML Dom node to retrieve the fields we are interested in and concatenate a string of <LI> items which we then set to the innerHTML property of a DIV element.

Each list item on the left is a hyperlink that calls the javascript function GetLinkItems when clicked.
This function is passed three parameters - the list Guid, list Title and the Default View URL which normally is the full list of links.

function GetLinkItems(ListGuid, ListName, ListDefaultView)

To get the list items we need to call the GetListItems method and pass it the listName parameter.

// Create SOAP Request
xmlrequest = SoapPrefix + '<GetListItems xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/">'
xmlrequest = xmlrequest + '<listName>' + ListGuid + '</listName></GetListItems>' + SoapPostfix;

To send the SOAP request we do the same as before only this time we set the GetListItems SOAP method

xmlhttpItems.open("POST", "_vti_bin/Lists.asmx?op=GetListItems ",true); xmlhttpItems.setRequestHeader("Content-Type","text/xml; charset=utf-8"); xmlhttpItems.setRequestHeader("SOAPAction","http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/GetListItems ");
// Set event handler
xmlhttpItems.onreadystatechange=ajaxsp_GetLinkItemsEvent;
// Post request
xmlhttpItems.send(xmlrequest);

Our GetLinkItemsEvent parses the XML and formats the data into a TABLE element with the ms-summarycustombody style to match the theme of the SharePoint site.
Each hyperlink has the target=”_blank” attribute which causes the links to open in a new window, my preferred method of opening links. This can easily be changed.

Creating a new Item Form

Now we have displayed our list of links we need to look at adding a new item.
In the Web Part after the script blocks I have some HTML that contains a DIV element. The DIV element has a style that sets its position to be absolute and hidden.
Inside the DIV I’ve create a HTML table that sets the layout of the AddNew form.
To render the URL editing and Notes fields I use the built-in functions provided in the SharePoint javascript file ows.js to handle input fields on SharePoint forms.
The complete list of fields type that can be used are:

DateField
URLField
NumberField
BooleanField
NoteField
RichTextField
TextField
FileNameField
GridChoiceField
ChoiceField

I only need to use the URLField and NoteField type.

These functions are called in javascript like this
var fld = new URLField(frm,"URL","URL", "","");
fld.fRequired = true;
fld.IMEMode="";fld.BuildUI();

The URLField function takes parameters of a OWSForm, Internal Field Name, Display Name, Default URL Value , Default Description.
BuildUI takes care of creating the input HTML which is great as it automatically creates two input fields, one for the URL and one for the description.

I create a NoteField object like this.

fld = new NoteField(frm,"Comments","Notes","");
fld.stNumLines = "6";
fld.IMEMode="";
fld.BuildUI();

The NoteField functions parameters are a OWSForm, Internal Field Name, Display Name, Default Note Field Value

Heres the function prototype for creating a OWSForm object:

function OWSForm(stName, fUseDHTMLOverride, stPagePath)

Creating the OWSForm is tricky in that it’s easy to create the OWSForm object in itself but it expects the name of the onpage form used in the WebPart page postbacks, that’s fine but it overwrites the onsubmit function which causes problems for any other component like the Web Part settings toolbar that need to post to the server. The way around this is to pass it a dummy name and then after the call set the Form name to the genuine article.
The second parameter is fUseDHTMLOverride which is used to force the use of DHTML when rendering the controls.
stPagePath is used to locate any extra files needed such as the datepicker’s template htm page.

Heres how its called in code

// Pass a dummy form name so it does not overwrite the Submit event
var _WPQ_frm= new OWSForm("DummyName" , true, "_layouts/");
// Now assign the proper form name it as it’s needed for the fields to locate their values
_WPQ_frm.stName=MSOWebPartPageFormName;

We use the global variable MSOWebPartPageFormName here which is defined in ows.js and available on all WebPartPages and gives the name of the FORM element used for postback. Note we don’t postback ourselves but the OWS Field elements think that they might.

I’ve laid out the new item form with the Javascript to create the edit fields embedded in a HTML table. This table is wrapped in a DIV which is initially hidden. The code to show and center the DIV element is Javascript 101 so I won’t go into details but check the function ajaxsp_DisplayNewForm if you’re interested.

I want to set focus to the Http edit field so we need to a reference to the Edit fields.
We can use getElementById for this but we need to know the name of the field on the form.
The key to this is to understand how the OWS form elements name themselves.

Fields are named by the internal function FrmStFieldNameFactory which does this:
return "OWS:" + name + ":" + stPart;
This concatenates OWS with the name of the field and the subfield name.

The URL field type is composed of two sub fields named URL and Desc. In this case we’re referencing the URL field and the URL subpart of that field.

So to reference the URL sub part of the URL field we can use this code.

var fldURL=document.getElementById("OWS:URL:URL");
if (fldURL) fldURL.focus();

Adding a new record via SOAP services

Now that we can get the URL, Description and Notes field values we use the UpdateListItems method of the Lists.asmx web service to add the new record.
This method takes a CAML string to do adds, updates and deletes.
This is an example CAML batch string we send:

<Batch>
<Method ID='1' Cmd='New'>
<Field Name='URL'>http/www.google.com, Description here - note comma and space</Field>
<Field Name='Comments'>My Comment String</Field>
<Method>
</Batch>

The ajaxsp_AddListItem routine assembles this string, places it inside the UpdateListItems SOAP string and sends it to the web service.
The ajaxsp_AddListItemEvent handles the returned SOAP string which may include a faultstring node if the SOAP call fails or an ErrorText node if the new record fails to add in SharePoint. Once the insert succeeds we hide the new item form and refresh the list.

Thats almost it, there is some extra code where I store the last displayed list in a cookie so if the page refreshes I can display the list items again. This cookie is designed to only last for the browser session.

Summary

This has been a deep dive into calling the SharePoint Web Services from client side javascript but the actual methods involved are pretty basic and simple to use, most of the complications and extra code come from handling non IE browsers.

Some of the other ways that Web Services could be used include adding field by field server-side validation, filling comboboxes from SQL Server tables, getting unread email counts information from Exchange via WebDav.

Feel free to download the DWP file and browse the code for yourselves.

> LinksLists.dwp (16.2 KB)>

Add SharePoint Portal Exclude/ Include Rules via Code

Colin Byrne — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 21:26:27 GMT

If you have ever wondered how you can add or remove items via code that you see on the exclude and include content page then here is some sample code to do that.

As you can see in the screen-shot below I’ve added a new rule (called a Site Restriction in SharePoint terms) that includes a main site and its content and excludes a subsite, these sub filters are called SitePaths.

Using code shown at the end of this entry I've added the w2k3-devclient:5003 site rule.

What we need to do is obtain the ISiteRestrictions interface and use its Add method passing it a group name (note this is not the full URL it must be a without the http:// prefix) and true or false indicating whether it is to be included or excluded.

MSSITLB.ISiteRestriction Add ( System.String bstrName , System.Boolean fIncluded )

The Add method returns a ISiteRestriction object which in turn has a Add method returning a ISitePath2 object which allows us to add Site Paths to fine tune the filtering of the content source.

Some methods of the ISitePath2 interface are

string AccountName [ get]
int AuthenticationType [ get]
bool FollowComplexUrls [ get, set ]
bool Included [ get, set ]
bool IncludeSubdirs [ get, set ]
bool SuppressIndex [ get, set ]

Curious at the 2 at the end of ISitePath2? Way back in the old days of COM if you wanted to extend an interface with new methods you couldn’t change the original as that was part of the COM contract of invariance of interfaces, so the developers normally just pegged the next number up on the interface name to create the new one. (Update: whoops this is just been added to .net best practice guidelines ;-) )

Now the path to actually get a ISiteRestriction interface is a bit torturous mainly because all the functionality for controlling the search engine is done by accessing the SharePoint Portal Search COM libraries via interop and the documentation for these interfaces are completely missing.

Also according to MSFT they are completely unsupported, hmm so the means of controlling your enterprise wide search engine via API’s is unsupported?

This is not good but hopefully completely sorted via a managed interface in v3.

For now to get access to the interfaces we need to add a reference to thses libraries on the COM tab - the SharePoint Portal Search CoClasses Type Library which gives us access to SearchAdminClass and also the Microsoft Search Interface Type Library for the other COM interfaces.

We instantiate the SearchAdminClass class which gives use access to the Applications property, now Applications in MS Search terminology comes down to the directory that the indexes are stored in. Different applications will have different directories, it’s a way of separating index content.
Each portal site has a specific ApplicationName that we get from the PortalSite object.
This then allows us to get a reference to the BuilderServer interface which we can get the list of Catalogs. The default catalogs are the famous Portal_Content and Non_Portal_Content.
Then finally within each catalog live the Site Restrictions which define the source of the data to be indexed.

Heres the sample code for a simple console application that lists the Catalogs and all the Site Restrictions and Site Paths within them.

As shown in the screen-shot above it also adds some test rules to the Non_Portal_Content catalog so comment that out of you don't want that to happen. >

using System;

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.Topology;
using MSSCTLB;
using MSSITLB;

namespace ShowRestrictions
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Summary description for Class1.
    /// </summary>
    class Class1
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// The main entry point for the application.
        /// </summary>
        [STAThread]
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            ShowRestrictions();
        }

        private static void ShowRestrictions()
        {
            TopologyManager man=new TopologyManager();

            PortalSite site=man.PortalSites[new Uri("http://w2k3-devclient:5001")];

            MSSCTLB.SearchAdminClass sadmin=new SearchAdminClass();

            IApplications applications1 = (IApplications) sadmin.Applications;
            IApplication2 application1 = (IApplication2) applications1[site.SearchApplicationName];
            IBuildServer2 buildserver= (IBuildServer2)application1.BuildServer;
            IBuildCatalogs2 catalogs=(IBuildCatalogs2)buildserver.BuildCatalogs;

            foreach(IBuildCatalog3 cat in catalogs)
            {

                Console.WriteLine("Catalog {0}",cat.Name);
                MSSITLB.ISiteRestrictions siterestrictions=(MSSITLB.ISiteRestrictions)cat.Sites;

                if (cat.Name=="Non_Portal_Content")
                {
                    MSSITLB.ISiteRestriction NewSearchContent=siterestrictions.Add("w2k3-devclient:5005",true);
                    NewSearchContent.Paths.Add("http://w2k3-devclient:5005/sites/",true);
                    NewSearchContent.Paths.Add("http://w2k3-devclient:5005/sites/dontsearchme/*",false);
                }

                foreach(ISiteRestriction2 restriction in siterestrictions)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(restriction.Name + "," + restriction.Included);
                    foreach(MSSITLB.ISitePath2 sitepath in restriction.Paths)
                        Console.WriteLine("SitePath : {0},{1}",sitepath.Path,sitepath.Included);
                }
            }

            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

Now there is a lot more to the Search classes than this, with them you can control all aspects of the search process and I hope to get some time to do more digging.

Colin.

Color Picker Web Part

Colin Byrne — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 10:19:02 GMT

Here's something I thought I'd throw out there to demonstrate the much underrated Content Editor Web Part (CEWP). It's a client-side JavaScript Color Picker based on code from http://www.mickweb.com/javascript/colours/websafe.html

The CEWP allows you to either embed formatted Rich Text into the web page or pure HTML/JavaScript so I could very quickly create a Web Part using the copied javascript. It just took a few mods such as getting rid of the image dependency by using a SPAN to form the cells instead.

The code's not much to talk about its just plain JavaScript creating a HTML <table> with <td>'s for the color cells. One interesting point is that the color table is dynamically generated. This is done by placing an empty block element, <p> in this case, giving it an ID and then set its innerHTML property to the generated table string.

function AttachColorTable(){
document.getElementById("'colourtable'").innerHTML= table_maker(36,6,'Select Colour');
}

This code is called on the load event of the page. I use attachEvent so I don't override any other code that may be using the onLoad event.

window.attachEvent('onload',AttachColorTable);

You can either import the DWP file on a single page or upload to the Site or Virtual Server galleries using instructions given by Todd Bleaker in a cool tip here http://mindsharpblogs.com/todd/archive/2005/08/04/646.aspx

Also check out the Google search Web Part also using the CEWP by Todd http://mindsharpblogs.com/todd/archive/2005/08/04/647.aspx

Download : Color Picker1.zip (1.36 KB)

Adding a hidden SharePoint Field in code

Colin Byrne — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 10:10:34 GMT

I tend to keep an eye on the sharepoint newsgroups mainly because I can jump in and help someone out with something I've had problems with in the past. One question today on the newsgroup was about adding a hidden field to a sharepoint list via the object model. I've hit this before and until you find out whats going on you feel a bit like you're in a maze of twisty passages all alike.

Often you might want an internal tracking flag or number handled via code that you don't want exposed in the edit list UI that some unsupecting user might then delete by accident.

In theory this should simple.

        SPSite spsite=new SPSite(http://localhost:4455);
        SPWeb web=spsite.OpenWeb();

        SPList list =web.Lists["Announcements"];

        string id=list.Fields.Add("NewField",SPFieldType.Boolean,false);
        SPField spfield=(SPField)list.Fields.GetField(id);

        spfield.Hidden=true;
        spfield.Update();

But if you try this you'll hit an exception - the reason? The code for the Hidden property checks to see if the property CanToggleHidden property is true and throws an exception if its not.

Fair enough,all we do then is set the CanToggleHidden property to true and do the update but there is no such property on the object model.

There are two ways around this but its best to know some internal details about the SPField object. This way the internal data for a field is stored is in an XML format like this

You can see here the CanToggleHiden and the Hidden properties. Note not all fields will have these extra properties if they are not set. The properties are read from /written to via the .dotnet XML classes.

This field definition is a subset of the whole list schema which is taken from the tp_Fields column of the Lists table in the SharePoint content database. The ColName refers to the column used to store the data in the UserData table. You don't need to add this column by hand its automatically calculated from the field type and number of fields of that type already in use.

Now the SPField object internally gets and set its properties into this XML fragment using some helper functions one of which is SetFieldBoolValue for boolean fields, there is also SetFieldIntValue and SetFieldAttributeValue.

The first way to get around the limitation is to add the field directly as XML using the AddFieldAsXml method on the SPFieldCollection using the XML format as above but leaving out the columnname.

SPList list =web.Lists["Announcements"];>

list.Fields.AddFieldAsXml("<Field DisplayName=\"NewField\" Type=\"Boolean\" Required=\"FALSE\" Name=\"NewField\" CanToggleHidden=\"TRUE\" Hidden=\"TRUE\"/>");

Thats the supported way but one other interesting method is to toggle the internal CanToggleHidden internal property with reflection.

Add a reference to the System.Reflection namespace and you can do this

   Type type = spfield.GetType();
   MethodInfo mi= type.GetMethod("SetFieldBoolValue", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance);
   mi.Invoke(spfield,new object[]{"CanToggleHidden", true});

you can then set the Hidden property via the OM without getting an exception

spfield.Hidden=true;
spfield.Update();

Either way both of these are hacks but at least one is supported.

Hiding SharePoint Page Elements when Printing

Colin Byrne — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 21:27:52 GMT

This entry was prompted by a question on a newsgroup about hiding screen elements so you can get the whole contents of a page fitting onto a printout without the top/left nav links.

Personally I don't like the printer friendly buttons you see on web pages mainly because you often find heaps of javascript dynamically altering DOM element's styles or the developer has coded a special version of the page just for the printer.
Sometimes that may be needed but I'd just recently done a website where this feature was requested and came across an aspect of css that I'd missed before. That was the media=print attribute. A few tweaks to the css file to hide navigation divs and margins and voila the printouts came out perfectly.

In CSS 2 you can specify different stylesheets for the different output devices the document may be rendered to, see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/media.html for the full details.
You can either reference a separate css file like this

or you can inline the style like this

@media print { .classname {display :none; visibility:hidden } }

So to alter how a SharePoint page looks when printed we can either alter the css files that SharePoint uses : ows.css and sps.css with SP Portal : or inline the stylesheet in the page.
We can inline by adding a Content Editor Web Part and using its source edit button to add this text

}
</style>

Go to File-Print Preview and you should see that the top and left nav bars are now hidden.
On the Portal sites you probably need to add the ms-navframe style to the list above as that's used in the left nav bar.

Getting Macromedia Flash to talk to Sharepoint

Colin Byrne — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 16:52:53 GMT

Towards the end of last year our company Flexnet Consultants decided to release a set of free Web Parts that we thought might be useful to have installed in WSS/SPS sites. The first of these was a Flash slideshow based on the pictures held in a SharePoint picture library http://www.flexnetconsult.co.uk/WebParts/FlashSlideShow.htm.

We like Flash a lot as its a great way to liven up dull static pages and the content can be a lot more than 'eye-candy'

The first thing you need is some way to create the swf file that Flash is compiled into, in-house we use Flash MX. The actual slideshow view of the pictures wasn't a real problem as that's exactly the kind of thing Flash is good at. We use ActionScript to control the action on the Flash stage.

The main issue was how to get a list of the pictures held in the library.

We looked at a few possible ways, one would be to pass a list of pictures to Flash using its URL or the FlashVars property, not pretty and not scaleable, the next idea was to talk to the SharePoint Web Services, this would have been ideal except Flash only really got proper support for talking to generic Web Services with the recent version 8 and we wanted to support Flash players version 6 and upwards to allow for the widest audience. We will probably create a version that supports 8 later.

That left us with one final method and it turns out to be a very easy one, the old SharePoint URL protocol available since version 1. The docs for these calls are here http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/spsdk11/Client_API/spURLProtocol.asp , there's a lack of useful examples but its pretty easy to use.

You pass parameters via URL to the SharePoint ISAPI DLL called owssvr.dll in the _vti_bin directory and it returns xml information either formated in a CAML style or raw data rowset style. We want raw Data so we put XMLDATA=true in the URL

As an example if you pass http://sharepoint.flexnet.ds/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=109&Cmd=Display&List={89ECD870-30EE-4E6E-B39B-B2C8CC548213}&XMLDATA=TRUE then you get this XML data back

- <xml xmlns:s="uuid:BDC6E3F0-6DA3-11d1-A2A3-00AA00C14882" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C14882" xmlns:rs="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:rowset" xmlns:z="#RowsetSchema">

- <s:Schema id="RowsetSchema">

- <s:ElementType name="row" content="eltOnly" rs:CommandTimeout="30">

- <s:AttributeType name="ows_SelectedFlag" rs:name="Selection Checkbox" rs:number="1">

<s:datatype dt:type="ui1" dt:maxLength="1" />

</s:AttributeType>

- <s:AttributeType name="ows_DocIcon" rs:name="Type" rs:number="2">

<s:datatype dt:type="string" dt:maxLength="512" />

</s:AttributeType>

- <s:AttributeType name="ows_NameOrTitle" rs:name="Name" rs:number="3">

<s:datatype dt:type="string" dt:maxLength="512" />

</s:AttributeType>

- <s:AttributeType name="ows_ImageSize" rs:name="Picture Size" rs:number="4">

<s:datatype dt:type="i4" dt:maxLength="4" />

</s:AttributeType>

- <s:AttributeType name="ows_FileSizeDisplay" rs:name="File Size" rs:number="5">

<s:datatype dt:type="i4" dt:maxLength="4" />

</s:AttributeType>

- <s:AttributeType name="ows_RequiredField" rs:name="" rs:number="6">

<s:datatype dt:type="string" dt:maxLength="1073741823" />

</s:AttributeType>

</s:ElementType>

</s:Schema>

- <rs:data>

<z:row ows_SelectedFlag="0" ows_DocIcon="jpg" ows_NameOrTitle="London01.jpg" ows_ImageSize="180" ows_FileSizeDisplay="10587" ows_RequiredField="Flash Test/London01.jpg" />

<z:row ows_SelectedFlag="0" ows_DocIcon="jpg" ows_NameOrTitle="London02.jpg" ows_ImageSize="180" ows_FileSizeDisplay="7675" ows_RequiredField="Flash Test/London02.jpg" />

<z:row ows_SelectedFlag="0" ows_DocIcon="jpg" ows_NameOrTitle="London03.jpg" ows_ImageSize="180" ows_FileSizeDisplay="14242" ows_RequiredField="Flash Test/London03.jpg" />

<z:row ows_SelectedFlag="0" ows_DocIcon="jpg" ows_NameOrTitle="London04.jpg" ows_ImageSize="180" ows_FileSizeDisplay="6755" ows_RequiredField="Flash Test/London04.jpg" />

<z:row ows_SelectedFlag="0" ows_DocIcon="jpg" ows_NameOrTitle="London05.jpg" ows_ImageSize="180" ows_FileSizeDisplay="19926" ows_RequiredField="Flash Test/London05.jpg" />

:row ows_SelectedFlag="1" ows_NameOrTitle="SubFolder1" ows_RequiredField="Flash Test/SubFolder1" />

</rs:data>

</xml>

As you can see the data holds information such as the filesize and the subfolders, this could be used to recurse into the sub folders if you wanted.

This format is exactly what we need as Flash has a XML object that can load XML data from a URL.

Example code for this would be

var x=new XML();
x.ignoreWhiteSpace = true;
x.onLoad = LoadDocs;
x.Load("http://sharepoint.flexnet.ds/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=109&Cmd=Display&List={89ECD870-30EE-4E6E-B39B-B2C8CC548213}&XMLDATA=TRUE");

The XML object will call the LoadDocs function when it has completed the data download.

All thats left is to iterate the XML nodes and extract the picture names from the attribute ows_RequiredField

}

> >

Now that we have the list of pictures we can then use ActionScript to rotate through them.

Once you have created your Flash SWF the final thing that needs to be done is to render out the OBJECT tag that will host the Flash file in the RenderWebPart event, this will look like this on the SharePoint page:

The FlashVars method allow you to reference parameters as variables in the ActionScript code e.g. _root.ServerBase and _root.SiteURL

Future Web Parts in the pipeline are an improved Slideshow, a PhotoStrip with dynamic pictures (like the Flikr badge) and a analog/digital clock.

> > >

Running both versions of ASP.NET with WSS

Colin Byrne — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 11:43:12 GMT

I've just been going through the process of upgrading my development SharePoint sites to run on ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL server 2005.

First I installed the WSS Service Pack 2. No problems there.

Then I upgraded one of my sites to run on ASP.NET 2.0 using the nice new IIS property tab and running the stsadm -o upgrade -forceupgrade -url http://portalsiteurl command . The ststadm command updates the web.config in the IIS root directory and it also runs the contents of Web Server Extensions\60\TEMPLATE\SQL\STOREUP.SQL. This adds some new fields to tables and updates a lot of the core stored procedures.

An IISRESET later and I could browse to the WSS sites running on ASP.NET 2.0 with no problems.

The real problem came when I try to access another set of WSS sites that were running on a different IIS virtual server that gave me the dreaded Server Application Unavailable error

No panic as I knew from previous experience this is almost always a problem with Web.Config parsing or Application Pool configuration/identity .

Checking the Event Log gave me this

Fantastic, a helpful error message, it pointed me straight to the fact that the same Application Pool was in use by both Virtual Server applications and ASP.NET doesn't support loading a second version of .NET in the same worker process.

The fix is to create a new App Pool for the applications you want to run under ASP.NET 2.0. This would include any .Net applications that share an AppPool not just SharePoint.

Create a new App Pool based on the existing SharePoint one, give it a meaningful name

Assign it to the Virtual Server running SharePoint

an iisreset later and you should be good to go.

I'm so glad I don't try this stuff out on live servers, anymore.

DoubleClick Minimise/Restore for WebParts

Colin Byrne — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 18:21:03 GMT

One Click Minimize/Restore for WebParts

One anoyance I have with WebPart pages that have a lot of WebParts is the need to click the WebPart menu to select Minimize or Restore when you want a little more screen real estate or you need to expand a previously minimized WebPart.

To solve this niggle I've developed a simple WebPart that using client side Javascript that traps the double click on a WebPart title and toggles the state of the WebPart. It integrates with the SharePoint client side object model so any changes are saved to the site and persists across sessions.

Unzip the DoubleClick WebPart Minimize/Restore DWP file to a directory of your choice

Browse to the SharePoint WebPart page - Click the 'Modify My Page' - 'Add Web Parts' - 'Import menu' option

Click the Browse button and select the DWP file.

Click the upload button - once uploaded you can drag the WebPart to anywhere on the page.

Here's a little more detail of the SharePoint client side scripting.

First I needed to get a list of WebParts on a page. Thats easy - every WebPart page that holds WebParts has a global object WPSC that is initialized like this WPSC.Init(document). The object WPSC is defined in IE55up.js/IE50.js/NonIe.js depending on browser. This is the Web Part Page Services Component which handles the client side WebPart infrastructure, it provides services such as loading/saving properties and handles page events see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/spptsdk/html/wpscaOverview_SV01098760.asp for more details.

OnPage javascript adds every WebPart on the page to its WebPartPage.Parts collection e.g.

WPSC.WebPartPage.Parts.Register('WPQ1','8db7d8d8-b1e0-4e9d-84ff-0b266b8c0beb',document.all.item('WebPartWPQ1'))

To get a list of all the WebParts on the Page you can do this

for(var i=0; i< WPSC.WebPartPage.Parts.Count;i++)
{
wp=WPSC.WebPartPage.Parts.Item(i);
}

What we really need is the WebPartQualifierproperty of the WebPart which is the unique ID for each WebPart on the Page, various parts of the WebPart are then suffixed with this identifier e.g WebPartTitleWPQ2 for the title div and WebPartWPQ2 for the actual serverside rendered HTML div container.

So to hook the DblClick event we can modify the inner loop like so

    wpq=WPSC.WebPartPage.Parts.Item(i).WebPartQualifier;
    var oTitle=document.getElementById('WebPartTitle' + wpq);

    if (oTitle)
    {
       oTitle.attachEvent('ondblclick',MinRestoreWP);
    }

Here we're setting the double click event to fire the MinRestoreWP function. this is defined as

function MinRestoreWP()
{
var WPQId, WPObject;
var titleid, WPQPos;

// Clear the selection the double click produces
document.selection.empty();
window.event.cancelBubble = true;
window.event.returnValue = false;

titleid=window.event.srcElement.parentNode.id;
WPQPos=titleid.lastIndexOf("WPQ");
if (WPQPos>0)
{
   WPQId='WebPart' + titleid.substring(WPQPos, titleid.length);
   WPObject=document.getElementById(WPQId);
   // call the MSO api to do the work
   if (WPObject) MSOLayout_MinimizeRestore(WPObject);
}

return false;
}

Here we get the WebPart to collapse or expand by going to the parent element of the Title bar which holds the WebPart title id which we can parse to get the WPQ id. This allows us to get the WebPart object we need.

The expand collapse is handled by a SharePoint function MSOLayout_MinimizeRestore which simply takes a WebPart object and does the hard work of hidding or showing the webpart by changing the WebPart.style.display CSS property. It also logs the change so the property is saved back to the WebPartPages webservice and is remembered if you close the browser and revisit the page.

DoubleClickWebPartMinimizeRestore.zip (1.35 KB)