Sundar Narasiman's Random Musings on .NET and SharePoint

SPServer myServer = myFarm.Servers["SERVER NAME"];

sws = (SPWebService)servinst.Service;

The following are the excellent screencasts related to SharePoint

• Building ASP.NET Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
  

  Create an ASP.NET Web Part project from scratch and get it up and running within a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site.

• Creating a Custom Page Layout with SharePoint Server 2007
  

  Create a custom page layout using the Web Content Management features of SharePoint Server 2007.

• Creating and Testing Features with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
  

  Use Visual Studio to create a custom feature and an associated assembly DLL.

• Creating and Using Content Types in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
  

  Create user-defined content types using inheritance, and then configure a document library to use these content types.

• Creating and Using Event Handlers in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
  

  Create a list item receiver class to handle both synchronous events as well as asynchronous events.

• Creating and Using Site Columns in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
  

  Create and reuse site columns across the sites within a site collection.

• Creating Custom Document Information Panels
  

  Discover the integration that exists between Document Information Panels and content types in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

• Creating Custom Task Panes in Visual Studio Tools for Office "v3" June CTP
  

  Create an add-in for Excel 2007 and then customize the application-level custom task pane.

• Creating Custom Workflows with the SharePoint Designer 2007
  

  Build a custom workflow using the SharePoint Designer wizard.

• Creating Windows SharePoint Services Sites with Support for Wikis and Blogs
  

  Leverage the new built-in features for creating sites with blogs and wikis.

• Customizing a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site with the SharePoint Designer 2007
  

  Understand the difference between page templates and page instances, and then learn how to customize your pages.

• Customizing the Ribbon with Visual Studio Tools for Office "v3" June CTP
  

  Create an add-in for PowerPoint 2007 to customize and modify the ribbon.

• Extending the Office 2007 UI with a Custom Ribbon
  

  Create a shared add-in with Visual Studio 2005 that extends the new user interface with a custom ribbon.

• Extending the Office 2007 UI with a Custom Task Pane
  

  Create a shared add-in with Visual Studio 2005 that extends the new user interface with a custom task pane.

• Generating Office Documents using the New Open XML File Formats
  

  Generate, read, and modify documents without going through the object model of the hosting Office application.

• Getting Up and Running with Excel Services
  

  Configure Excel Services so that you can publish an Excel spreadsheet to a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site.

There are various web part events in the life-cycle. The following would shed some light to these events and help us to choose these events correctly based on the needs

OnPreRender- It is called logically called before Render event of the ASP.NET page. This is the last opportunity for us to affect the rendering behavior of the web part page. Things like changes to the viewstate properties can be done logically in the OnPreRender event.   Moreover the OnPreRender  event is called logically after the events EnsureChildControls and CreateChildControls

CreateChildControls:

If we need to render the ASP.NET web server controls (ike button, text box etc) in the web part, this event needs to be overridden. Logically we can add web controls and wire the events to it

Render

This event is used logically to control the rendering behavior of the web part. There is already a default implementation of Render method. We need not always override Render method for certain cases like CreateChildControls method having the logic to add controls. Render method can also be used to render html stream (directly) and ASP.NET web server controls

Render Control

This method can be called inside the overridden Render method to render the ASP.NET web server controls like button, textbox etc...

Render Contents

RenderContents gives power to render the html streams directly inside the overridden Render method. The RenderContents should be preceded by RenderBeginTag and the RenderContents should be followed RenderEndTag

Scenario

Is it possible to perform catastrophic backup and restore through stsadm command line utility?

Solution

Yes, this can be performed with the help of stsadm command line utility itself. The following would do a complete farm-level catastrophic backup

stsadm -o backup -directory file://backupservernetbiosname/backupsharename -backupmethod full

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/f01916b3-1fe8-4ddd-bade-d5d0fdaa1ffe1033.mspx?mfr=true

http://mindsharpblogs.com/ben/archive/2006/09/19/1292.aspx

If the backup restore strategy needs to be comprehensive, the IIS Metabase also needs to be considered

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/01/02/relationship-between-the-iis-metabase-and-sharepoint-configuration-database.aspx

Scenario

There is a server running SharePointPortalServer 2003. It has many web applications running SharePoint sites.  How to remove SharePoint from just one web application?  

Solution

The unextend functionality of stsadm.exe can be used to remove SharePoint from the selected IIS web application

stsadm.exe -o unextendvs -url <url> -deletecontent

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/f057d1e5-f8b7-4c92-bb98-3f983df2a2d11033.mspx?mfr=true
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/WSS/en/library/c3314243-a583-4e62-a49a-baf706da97401033.mspx

If SharePoint needs to be completely removed from the server, the SharePoint server needs to be un-installed and the other components like indexes, database also need to be removed

Scenario:-

There is a Link web part and a Page viewer web part on the web part page. The requirement is that, whenever a user clicks on a particular link inside Link Web Part it should automatically render the corresponding page inside the page viewer web part.

Challenges:-

By default the page viewer web part does not support connections.

Solution:-

The solution is to create a page viewer web part that accepts the url as the connectable parameter. There is an interesting post by Todd Baginski about creating a connectable Page Viewer Web Part

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/tbaginski/archive/2007/08/16/connected-page-viewer-web-part.aspx

Even though the code-sample mentioned in the above link is for SPS 2003, we need to do code changes if we are developing it for WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007. Probably if we are developing the web part as "SharePoint web part" the code changes we'd be making is less, compared to developing it as "ASP.NET" web parts.

I'd try this developing it for WSS 3.0/ MOSS 2007 and share my experiences

Scenario

XMLFormView web part is used to render the Infopath browser forms.  The XmlFormView web part cannot add to the web part page. It throws error message "The form has been closed"

Cause

This problem can be due to several reasons. They are listed below

• The location ".xsn" might be hard-coded with an incorrect location
• The XML FormView web part might be deployed to bin without sufficient code-access permissions

Solution

This can be solved by the following steps

• Not to hard-code the .xsn location in the code-behind of XmlFormView web part
• Provide the proper code-access permissions to the web part

Imports System.Security

After adding the web part to the web part page, provide the correct location of ".xsn" to the web part property

There is a requirement to index and search PDF documents inside MOSS 2007.  The first thing that comes to my mind is "IFilters".  Then I need to choose between the V6 and V8.1 of the IFilters. The advantage of Acrobat Reader V8.1 reader is that it has IFilters inside. 

I did not choose V8.1 . Because I don't have special requirement to deal with WDS search. So I've chosen IFilters V6. Here are steps that I followed to install the pdf IFilters

a)Download Adobe PDF IFilters 6.0

b)Start -->Run-->> Services.msc and stop the IIS Admin service. The reason we need to do this is, the IFilters configuration needs an update to DOCICON.XML.

c)Run the IFilters installer on the Indexing Server

d) Download the pdf icon image  of size 17X17 from the following location and save it as "icpdf.gif" somewhere to the local hard disk

http://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html     

d)Copy the icpdf.gif to the following location

"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Template\Images"

e) Go the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web server extensions\12\Template\Xml\

f) Edit the DOCICON.XML by adding the following entry

<Mapping Key="pdf" Value="icpdf.gif"/>

g) Perform an IIS RESET

h) Go to Search Settings under Central Administration and add the pdf as the new file type

g) Perform the crawl again

Now MOSS is supposed to search pdf documents properly. This is what said in so many Articles and Blogs. It did not work for me that easily. After some analysis, I've learnt that I need to apply a Microsoft Hot fix to make this work for MOSS 2007. The Microsoft Hot fix mentions the following steps to be performed to make the pdf search work for MOSS 2007

1. Add the following registry entry, and then set the registry entry value to pdf:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Applications\<GUID>\Gather\Search\Extensions\ExtensionList\38

To do this, follow these steps: a. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.

b. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Applications\GUID\Gather\Search\Extensions\ExtensionList

c. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click String Value.

d. Type 38, and then press ENTER.

e. Right-click the registry entry that you created, and then click Modify.

f. In the Value data box, type pdf, and then click OK.

2. Verify that the following two registry subkeys are present and that they contain the appropriate values.

Note these registry subkeys and the values that they contain are created when you installed the Adobe PDF IFilter on the server.

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf

This registry subkey must contain the following registry entry:• Name: Default

Type: REG_MULTI_SZ

Data: {4C904448-74A9-11D0-AF6E-00C04FD8DC02}

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\Filters\.pdf

This registry subkey must contain the following registry entries:

• Name: Default

Type: REG_SZ

Data: (value not set)

• Name: Extension

Type: REG_SZ

Data: pdf

• Name: FileTypeBucket

Type: REG_DWORD

Data: 0x00000001 (1)

• Name: MimeTypes

Type: REG_SZ

Data: application/pdf

3. Upload the PDF documents to the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Web site.

a. Stop and then start the Windows SharePoint Services Search service. To do this, follow these steps:a. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.

b. Stop the Windows SharePoint Services Search service. To do this, type net stop spsearch at the command prompt, and then press ENTER.

c. Start the Windows SharePoint Services Search service. To do this, type net start spsearch at the command prompt, and then press ENTER.

d. Type exit to exit the command prompt.

 Now MOSS is ready to search pdf documents

Scenario

Solution

In Visual Studio 2005 --> Tools -----> External Tools

Click Add button

Enter the Title 'Fetch Public Key'

Under Command, choose the sn.exe from C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin

Scenario

Cause of the Problem

After analysis we found that, the images in the master pages were not picking the URL relative to the newly created site. It's picking the URL relative to old site, from which the template was created

 <img alt="" src="/Sites/old site/_catalogs/masterpage/testimage.gif" width="974" height="69"></td> 

Resolution

We replaced the image tag with ASP.NET Image server control

<asp:Image ImageUrl="./../../images/testimage.gif" runat="server"/>

This made it to work. Whenever we need to disribute a sharepoint site template with custom master pages, it's better to use ASP.NET Image control instead of <img> tags