SharePoint Dragons

What do I do with Metadata and Documents? Is it possible to inherit Metadata?  Do I use Folders or Document Sets? This blog post provides the answers to these questions.

Folders & Metadata

It is possible to set default Metadata for every folder in your Document Library. You can set defaults on all of the subfolders from the root, by default this will be inherited.

Follow the next steps to do this:

1. First you have to create the folders  and columns you want.
2. Go to the Document Library
3. Go to Library Settings
4. Click Column default value settings (General settings)
5. Select the folder (left) where you want to set a default
6. Select the column that you want to use
7. Set the default value for the column > click OK

That’s all! If you upload a document in the folder where you have set a default Metadata value, this value will be automatically filled.

Note: More information about SharePoint 2010 Best Practices Folders can be found at  https://sharepointdragons.com/2012/03/27/sharepoint-2010-best-practices-folders-not-necessarily-considered-evil/

Document Sets & Metadata

If you have multiple documents that are part of a single project or tasks you can use a Document Set. With Document Sets you can group ,multiple documents and share the Metadata en versioning. In a Document Set you can pass Metadata from the Document Set to the documents in the Document Set.

Follow the next steps if you want to use Document Sets. First you have to enable Documents Sets in the site collection:

1. Go to Site Actions
2. Go to Site Settings
3. Go to Site Collection Features
4. Click Document Sets

Note: Take a look at the following page if you want more information about which feature you need to activate: https://sharepointdragons.com/tag/features/

After activating the Documents Sets site collection feature you can use Documents Sets in your Document Libraries

1. Create a Document Library
2. Go to Library Settings
3. Go to Advanced Settings
4. Allow management of content types > click OK
5. Go to Add from existing site content types
6. Add Document Set > click OK
7. Go the the Document Library
8. Click Documents
9. Click New Document Set

Via the Document Set Settings page you can select which column values from the Document Set  should be automatically synchronized to all documents in the Document Set.

1. Go to the Document Library
2. Go to Library Settings
3. Click Document Set (Content Types)
4. Click Document Set settings

If you upload a document (or multiple) into the Document Set you will notice that the column values are synchronized.

There are situations where people experience disastrous response times when trying to count the number of items in a collection or folder. Why does this happen? A long time ago, we wrote about this at http://www.loisandclark.eu/Pages/Velocity.aspx . Basically, looping thru a collection and calling the Count property leads to a huge amount of SQL queries that are fired, resulting in a disappointing performance.

The best thing you can do in such a situation is establish what happens under the covers, and take actions accordingly. Usually, people advise to do this using SQL Server Profiler, which works fine for dev scenarios, but isn’t recommendable (because of performance reasons) in a production environment. Instead, you’d be better of executing a SQL DMV query that identifies the currently running SQL queries. Such as this one:

SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED

SELECT er.session_Id AS [Spid] , sp.ecid , DB_NAME(sp.dbid) AS [Database] , sp.nt_username , er.status , er.wait_type , SUBSTRING (qt.text, (er.statement_start_offset/2) + 1, ((CASE WHEN er.statement_end_offset = -1 THEN LEN(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX), qt.text)) * 2 ELSE er.statement_end_offset END – er.statement_start_offset)/2) + 1) AS [Individual Query] , qt.text AS [Parent Query] , sp.program_name , sp.Hostname , sp.nt_domain , er.start_time

FROM sys.dm_exec_requests er

INNER JOIN sys.sysprocesses sp ON er.session_id = sp.spid

CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(er.sql_handle)as qt

WHERE session_Id > 50

AND session_Id NOT IN (@@SPID)

ORDER BY session_Id, ecid

SQL DMV query techniques are discussed in the excellent book http://www.amazon.com/SQL-Server-DMVs-Action-Management/dp/1935182730/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338967190&sr=8-1 . We were technical reviewers for this book, and will devote a separate blog post to this book, but if you’re interested, check it out.