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Nikander & Margriet on SharePoint

Category Archives: SharePoint

Want to use a different user account when logged into SharePoint Designer 2010?

Leave a comment Posted by Nikander & Margriet Bruggeman on January 17, 2012

Somebody asked this exact same question, and we were wondering how to do it. It turns out that, once connected to a SharePoint site, there is a very small icon at the bottom left that allows you to switch user accounts: check out http://www.sharepointkings.com/2011/08/login-with-different-user-sharepoint.html

Long operation in progress

Leave a comment Posted by Nikander & Margriet Bruggeman on January 13, 2012

Sometimes, there are operations on a SharePoint application page or a web part that take a long time to complete. The best thing to do is to reuse the In Progress animated picture used by SharePoint itself, as shown in the next picture:

This can be accomplished easily by using the SPLongOperation class of the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace. It sets the web page image to the image used by the server to indicate a lengthy operation (typically, an animated image with associated text). The code goes something like this (taken from http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010general/thread/6d40adc2-0a61-448b-81ba-69ec7c4e5144):

using (SPLongOperation objLongOperations = new SPLongOperation(this.Page))

{
objLongOperations.LeadingHTML =”Processing request”;
objLongOperations.TrailingHTML = “Please wait while the request is being processed…”;
objLongOperations.Begin();

//Write your code here

System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(25000);//added to show the processing screen. Nor required in actual implementation
objLongOperations.End(this.Page.Request.Url.ToString());

}

Check this blog post for more information: http://peterheibrink.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/splongoperation/

SharePoint sharepoint

Determining the SharePoint server version from a client programmatically

Leave a comment Posted by Nikander & Margriet Bruggeman on January 12, 2012

The next bit was taken from a forum post and written by Wayne Fan:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010general/thread/285ee634-2850-40cb-aec6-ace9297526a6

It’s a piece of code that issues a HTTP request and can be used for determining the version of SharePoint on a server. We’re documenting it here, because we know there’ll come a day that we’ll need this code:

HttpWebRequest request =(HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(“http://<servername>/default.aspx”);

request.Credentials=new NetworkCredential(“<username>”,”<password>”,”<domain>”);

HttpWebResponse response =(HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

request.Accept = “text/plain”;

Console.WriteLine(“Server Version:{0}”,response.GetResponseHeader(“MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices”));

When it’s a SharePoint 2010 site, you will get the result is like this: MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices: 14.0.0.6106

And in SharePoint 2007 site, the result is like this: MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices:12.0.0.4518

SharePoint sharepoint

Web analytics unique visitors go sky high

3 Comments Posted by Nikander & Margriet Bruggeman on January 12, 2012

On a recent consultancy job, we were told that a certain site collection was used by a total group of 100 people. Big was our surprise when we turned to the SharePoint 2010 Web Analytics feature and found the site collection had a total of around 1000 unique visitors per day. Strange, no?

The definition of the total number of unique visitors per day can be found on the Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ecm/archive/2010/05/03/web-analytics-in-sharepoint-2010-insights-into-reports-and-metrics.aspx : the total number of unique visitors per day consists of all SharePoint authenticated users plus anonymous users. In the last case, each unique IP address counts as a unique (anonymous) visitor.

Then, we saw something strange on one of our dev machines. The total number of unique visitors/day on a given site collection was 7, whereas there is only one user account on this machine. So, 7 different unique visitors was impossible on this machine. Were we on to something?

Intrigued, we took a look at the database. After doing some snooping around, we expected that the database WebAnalyticsServiceApplication_ReportingDB_[guid] is the database that holds the web analytics data.

After running a trace, we knew for sure. Executing the following table valued function returned the contents of our Site Collection Web Analytics Reports – Summary page:

— Get info for Site Collection Web Analytics Reports – Summary
exec sp_executesql N’SELECT TOP (2000) [propertyname], [currentvalue], [previousvalue], [percentagechange]
FROM [dbo].[fn_WA_GetSummary](@p0, @p1, @p2, @p3, default)
ORDER BY [PropertyName] ASC’
,N’@p0 int,@p1 int,@p2 int,@p3 uniqueidentifier’,@p0=20111213,@p1=20111113,@p2=30,@p3=’9519CAC1-F9AE-3BF8-D261-119A8B0A4F33′

Taking a look inside the function, we found the following T-SQL code being equivalent to the retrieval of unique visitors info:

— Get unique visitors info
DECLARE @CurrentStartDateId int = 20111213
DECLARE @PreviousStartDateId int = 20111113
DECLARE @Duration int = 30
DECLARE @AggregationId [dbo].[AggregationIdDataType] = ‘9519CAC1-F9AE-3BF8-D261-119A8B0A4F33’
DECLARE @IncludeSubSites bit = 1

DECLARE @CurrentEndDateId int, @PreviousEndDateId int
SET @CurrentEndDateId = [dbo].[fn_WA_AddDateId](@CurrentStartDateId, @Duration – 1)
SET @PreviousEndDateId = [dbo].[fn_WA_AddDateId](@PreviousStartDateId, @Duration – 1)

SELECT
‘UniqueVisitors’ AS [PropertyName],
(
SELECT [Frequency]
FROM [dbo].[fn_WA_GetTotalTrafficVolume]
(@CurrentStartDateId, @CurrentEndDateId, @AggregationId, @IncludeSubSites, 2)
) AS [CurrentValue],
(
SELECT [Frequency]
FROM [dbo].[fn_WA_GetTotalTrafficVolume]
(@PreviousStartDateId, @PreviousEndDateId, @AggregationId, @IncludeSubSites, 2)
) AS [PreviousValue]

Apparently, the fn_WA_GetTotalTrafficVolume function plays an important role in determining the number of unique visitors. The next T-SQL code determined our current number of unique visitors:

— Current unique visitors from table-valued function
SELECT [Frequency]
FROM [dbo].[fn_WA_GetTotalTrafficVolume]
(@CurrentStartDateId, @CurrentEndDateId, @AggregationId, @IncludeSubSites, 2)
— Current unique visitors from underlying table
SELECT
    ISNULL(SUM([Frequency]), 0) AS [Frequency]
FROM [dbo].[WATrafficAggregationByDate] WITH (NOLOCK)
WHERE
    [AggregationId] = @AggregationId AND
    [IncludeSubSites] = 1 AND
    [MetricType] = 2 AND
    [DateId] BETWEEN @CurrentStartDateId AND @CurrentEndDateId

This function sums all unique users per day, but if you want to see the real number of unique users per day, you do:

— Show unique users per day
SELECT *
FROM [dbo].[WATrafficAggregationByDate] WITH (NOLOCK)
WHERE
    [AggregationId] = @AggregationId AND
    [IncludeSubSites] = 1 AND
    [MetricType] = 2 AND
    [DateId] BETWEEN @CurrentStartDateId AND @CurrentEndDateId

Using this query, we found 7 entries. This looks a lot more like the Site Collection Web Analytics Reports – Number of Daily Unique Visitors page. So, there was the answer we were looking for.

According to IFABC Global Web Standards, a unique visitor is an IP address plus a further identifier (such as user name, user agent, or a cookie). If you want to know how many daily unique visitors there are, you should go to the Site Collection Web Analytics Reports – Number of Daily Unique Visitors page. The Summary page is nothing more than a summation of all days and all unique visitors.

Is this a bad thing? We feel it is at least a little (okay, more than just a little). It makes sense to provide overviews of the number of unique visitors per day, week, month, year or whatever. By simply summarizing all unique visitors, soon the number of unique visitors on the Summary page goes sky high. It leads to a situation where web analytic reports show that there are 1000 unique visitors, whereas in reality there are only 100. We know it’s a summary page, but we also feel this is a situation where simple math doesn’t apply to this data and leads to confusing results.

SharePoint, Web Analytics sharepoint

Uninstalling Dashboard Designer

Leave a comment Posted by Nikander & Margriet Bruggeman on January 11, 2012

Dashboard Designer is a ClickOnce application that is the tool for creating PerformancePoint Services scorecards and dashboards. You can’t remove it from the Windows Control Panel using the Add/Remove Programs option. If you want to remove Dashboard Designer from a client machine by doing the following:

Delete the shortcut on the Start menu .
Delete everything under %userprofile%/local settings/apps/2.0.

The last step also removes the other ClickOnce apps, but they can be downloaded again once needed.

PerformancePoint, SharePoint PerformancePoint, sharepoint

Nice custom workflow activity for copying attachments

Leave a comment Posted by Nikander & Margriet Bruggeman on January 9, 2012

This is a nice CodePlex project that’s able to copy list item attachments to other locations:

http://spdactivities.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Copy List Item Extended Activity&ProjectName=spdactivities

SharePoint sharepoint

Using folders or not?

2 Comments Posted by Nikander & Margriet Bruggeman on January 9, 2012

Nowadays lots of people tend to recommend not to use list folders in favor of views. Just came across an interesting bit of info at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-foundation-help/manage-lists-and-libraries-with-many-items-HA010377496.aspx#_Toc264017709: folders improve the efficiency of data access. Creating a folder also leads to the creation of an internal index (which is also created for the root folder). When you access items in a folder, you’re leveraging this internal index to access data.

SharePoint sharepoint