SharePoint Dragons

In SharePoint 2010 you can set alerts on many things, like lists, libraries, folders, document sets, items. But did you know that you can also set an alert on a view?

The most important thing to know about setting an alert on a view is that the view must be configured with a filter otherwise the option will not appear in the alert settings.

1. First you have to select the view which you want the alert for
2. Select an item (that could be a folder, document set or item) and click Alert Me
3. On the Alert Me page, go to the Send Alerts for These Changes section and select the Someone changes an item that appears in the following view radio button.

   

You have to be a little bit careful when you’re retrieving a SharePoint folder name using the client object model that has a space in its name. The correct way to do it is to replace the space with “%20”:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using Microsoft.SharePoint;

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client;

namespace ConsoleApplication1

{

    class Program

    {

        static void Main(string[] args)

        {

            try

            {

                //string folderName = “/MyDox/Test”;

                string folderName = “/MyDox/Name%20withSpace”;

                ClientContext context = new ClientContext(“http://astro“);

                Web web = context.Web;

                List list = context.Web.Lists.GetByTitle(“MyDox”);

Folder folder = web.GetFolderByServerRelativeUrl(folderName);               

context.Load(context.Web);

                context.Load(list);

                context.Load(folder);               

                context.ExecuteQuery();

                Console.WriteLine(folder.Name);

            }

            catch (Exception err)

            {

                Console.WriteLine(err.Message);

            }

        }

    }

}

Sometimes you don’t want a column, for example the Created By column, to be a link to user info but just plain text.  You can do this very easy with SharePoint Designer:

1. First of all you have to open your SharePoint list in SharePoint Designer
2. In the Views section, select the view that you want to modify

   

3. Go to the Design view of the selected view
4. Click on any name displayed in the Created By column
5. Go to the List View Tools in the ribbon and select the Design tab
6. Click Customize XSLT in the Actions section and select Customize Item

   

7. Check if the name you selected earlier (Step 4) is still selected and click Delete.

   

8. Go to the Current Date Source and select Author.title

   

9. Drag Author.title to the place where you deleted the name from (Step 7)

Save the view in SharePoint Designer en refresh your SharePoint site to take a look at the result.

Note: This change is only made for this particular view of a list. If you would have another view, that view would still use the Created By column with a hyperlink.

Using Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 you will notice that the SharePoint DLLs are not listed in the Add Reference > NET tab.

Follow the next steps to add a SharePoint DL reference:

1. In Visual Studio 2010, right click your project and select Properties
2. Go to the Application tab and set the Target framework to 3.5
3. Go to the Build tab and set the Platform to x64
4. Go to your project in the Solution Explorer and select Add Reference.
5. Browse to the ISAPI folder in the SharePoint root to add the SharePoint DLL.

But, instead of these 5 steps above you could also install CKS Development Tools Edition (http://cksdev.codeplex.com/) to make this a lot easier. You can install the CKS Development Tools via Tools > Extension Manager. After installing you will notice a new SharePoint tab in Add Reference which makes it very easy to add a reference to the SharePoint DLL.

A question that is asked regularly is how to do forms authentication when you’re using the SharePoint client object model. We have blogged about this before at https://sharepointdragons.com/2012/04/20/authentication-when-using-the-sharepoint-client-object-model/ , but the solution below is clean and well worth to mention (it uses the managed client object model):

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Net;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client;

namespace ConsoleApplication2
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {               
                using (var context = new ClientContext(“http://astro:46454″))
                {
                    context.AuthenticationMode = ClientAuthenticationMode.FormsAuthentication;
                    FormsAuthenticationLoginInfo formsAuthInfo = new FormsAuthenticationLoginInfo(“anton”, “anton!0”);
                    context.FormsAuthenticationLoginInfo = formsAuthInfo;

                   
                    var site = context.Site;
                    context.Load(site);
                    context.ExecuteQuery();
                    Console.WriteLine(site.Url);
                }
            }
            catch (Exception err)
            {
                var errMsg = err.Message;
            }
        }
    }
}

Application pages are a special type of ASP.NET pages. An application page is designed to be used in a SharePoint site and uses a SharePoint master page. Using a master page you ensure that the application pages have the same look and feel as the other SharePoint pages. It is also possible to use an application page in SharePoint Central Administration.

The following MSDN article is a guideline for building application pages for SharePoint Central Administration: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff798467.aspx.

Let’s take a look at the following Note:

There is another way to make sure that your feature is activated on the Central Administration Web site, just follow the next steps:

1. Go to your Visual Studio project.
2. In Solution Explorer, expand Features and expand your custom feature.
3. Double click the .feature file.
4. Take a look at the properties and set the Auto Activate in Central Admin property to True

   

5. Press F5 to deploy and test your solution

Note: You cannot set the local site to the URL of your Central Administration Web site and the Auto Activate in Central Admin property to True. You have to choose which solution you want to use.

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.