Ben Walters InfoPath MVP : SharePoint 2007

SharePoint Saturday Sydney Registrations now open

Ben Walters — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:11:16 GMT

Registrations for SharePoint Saturday Sydney are now open, so if you are planning to attend I recommend you head over now and follow the “Click to Attend” link Also don’t forget if you have any session ideas you can also forward them through using the...(read more)

ANNOUNCING SharePoint Saturday Sydney!

Ben Walters — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 02:01:00 GMT

It’s official SharePoint Saturday will be happening on the 8th of August at the Microsoft office in North Ryde. For those of you who don’t know SharePoint Saturday is the tech community craze that’s been sweeping the U.S. (and more recently the world...(read more)

Get SharePoint host headers working locally in Windows 2008 R2

Ben Walters — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 06:09:52 GMT

So as we all know by now I recently rebuilt my machine with Windows 2008 R2. My main reason for doing this is so I could have a fully functional SharePoint development environment that runs locally without the need for virtual machines. Plus I now have...(read more)

SharePoint Timer Service issues when upgrading to SP2

Ben Walters — Tue, 19 May 2009 01:35:22 GMT

Last week I had my first official deployment of SharePoint SP2 in the field. While most of the install succeeded with out any issues I did run into a problem while I was attempting to run the configuration wizard. The error I received indicated that the...(read more)

SharePoint 503 Service Unavailable Error

Ben Walters — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:31:11 GMT

For the last couple of days I’ve been doing some work on a SharePoint event handler which was progressing at a good rate until I started getting a “503 Service unavailable” error after deploying an update. After some searching it turned out that when...(read more)

SharePoint Designer at no extra cost

Ben Walters — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:14:02 GMT

Wow where does the time go I just had a look and my last post was on the 27 of Jan lot has happened since then and lots to tell but this is a quick post before I head back out in to the fray. I got news the other day that SharePoint Designer that Application...(read more)

SharePoint Designer Workflow Gottcha

Ben Walters — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 13:06:02 GMT

Recently I’ve been working on improving some internal processes at Stargate, one of these processes related to submitting travel requests. I ran into issues however, when I started building the workflow in SharePoint designer. My workflow was pretty simple...(read more)

SharePoint Server 2007 Anonymous Access Gotcha!

Ben Walters — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 04:51:13 GMT

Today for the first time I was attempting to create a SharePoint site with Anonymous Access. As I usually do when attempting to trying something new I fired up my MOSSDEMO image and promptly created a new web application. However after following all the steps to the letter in Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 book I was still being prompted for windows credentials when I attempted to access the site.

After attempting the set up 2 or 3 times it dawned on me, "I was using windows authentication to access the WSS_Content database" so when I hit my site SharePoint was passing through the authorisation request hence resulting in a prompt for windows credentials.

After creating a SharePointSvc account on my SQL server and setting up yet another web application my Anonymous access was up and running. Now to get forms authentication going!

[Update:]

Ok so put some egg on my face turns out my issue had noting to do with using a SQL account my problem was that my Network Service account didn't have access to my WSS Content database, added the service account to my SQL server and Bob's my uncle everything worked a treat.

MOSSIG follow up SharePoint installer project from Codeplex

Ben Walters — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 03:00:33 GMT

Hey everyone as promised here is the link to the SharePoint web Part project template for Visual Studio 2008 that I showed last night.

Also don't forget Will mentioned that a full VSE for Visual Studio 2008 is due out in the next couple of months. I'll do my best to put up link to this as soon as I know more.

Finally a big thanks to all who attended and presented last night, and don't forget to checkout MOSSIG.Net for all details on upcoming presentations and news.

Technorati Tags: Codeplex,SharePoint,MOSS,Webpart

Using the Content Query Web part on MySite

Ben Walters — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:06:33 GMT

So I was out on client site today attempting to setup the content query web part on a MySite, after exporting the web part and re-importing it to the my site I then got a "Could not load XSL file. The system cannot find the file specified" error. After google failed to provide me an answer I decided to have a play around with the site settings for the MySite and found that if I enabled the "Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure" site collection features the content query web part started working like a charm. Not only that but if I deactivated the feature afterwards the web part would continue to function normally

Contact Selector the Good and the Bad

Ben Walters — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 11:39:51 GMT

This week I was working on an InfoPath solution that required the use of the Contact Selector Control that is included with InfoPath, basically this is an Active X control that you can use as a way of selecting accounts that exist on your SharePoint server (for more info on the control and how to set it up check out this post from the InfoPath team blog) Now there is a standing rule that Active X controls don't work in form services however this control is the exception to that rule and can be used in a browser enabled form. This being said there are some pit falls to keep in mind when using this control with managed code in a browser based deployment as you'll see below.

While I didn't have any trouble getting the control working I did have a requirement where by I needed to limit the number of contacts selected to 1. Now on the post noted above it is recommended to use the following code on the Validating event of the controls container group to add an error to the forms error collection hence preventing the user from submitting the form before continuing.

if (e.Operation == XmlOperation.Insert)

{

if (e.Site.SelectChildren(XPathNodeType.Element).Count > 1)

{

e.ReportError(e.Site, false, Message, "Only 1 user can be selected!");

}

}

This code worked great in the client version of the form however when I ran the browser version of the form, I found that this code would not run reliably.

If I entered 2 surnames to validate lets say "Smith" and "Jones" then clicked the validate button the names would be resolved from the server and the control would be updated accordingly. However it seemed that the validation code had not run as there was no error being displayed. If I clicked the validate button a second time the error would then be displayed. From what I could tell the form was either not posting back to the server correctly or the web version of the form wasn't being refreshed. As there is no option to force the control to post back to the server. This meant I could end up with a validation error on the form that wasn't visible to the user but would prevent the from submitting back to the server.

With my first attempt shot down for the time being I decided to take another approach, and add the following code to the Changed Event of the containing group that would remove all existing person records that didn't exist at Index 1.

if (e.Operation == XmlOperation.Insert)

{

for (int i = e.Site.SelectChildren(XPathNodeType.Element).Count; i >= e.Site.SelectChildren(XPathNodeType.Element).Count && i > 1; i--)

{

e.Site.SelectSingleNode("./my:Person[" + i + "]", this.NamespaceManager).DeleteSelf();

}

}

This code worked pretty well in the client version of the form as well, however once I deployed the form to Form Services I started getting errors from Form Services when I tried to Validate the entered contact or add a contact via the Select button.

Finally with both ideas giving me headaches and not much time left on the project clock I decided to remove my validation code, and email the InfoPath team and see if they had any ideas. Luckily in this circumstance this was not a big issue, as I was using the Contact Selector control as an routing input for a workflow so only the first contact in the control would be used. It would be nice to get a resolution to this though.

The Good

Great way to get login based contact information in your form especially when that data is used in a workflow scenario
Works in both the client and browser based solutions
When used in a client based solution custom code can be added to validate the number of contacts selected

The Bad

Can be a little precious about event code when used in a browser based deployment
No out of the box way to limit the number of contacts selected
No way to force the control to post back in a browser based deployment which means the validation errors and underlying data source can get out of sync