Quick and Simple: Provision a Web Site Using SharePoint Object Model In C#

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I tried searching for a little snippet code that would show how I can create a new SPWeb in a site collection.  I didn’t find it as quickly or easily as I expected so I thought I’d slap together a little entry on the subject.

This code creates a new Wiki site:

 SPSite siteCollection;

    siteCollection = new SPSite("http://conchang-o9l8qi");

    SPWeb w = siteCollection.OpenWeb();

    w.Webs.Add("xyzzy", "xyzzy Title",
        "xyzzy description", 1033, SPWebTemplate.WebTemplateWIKI, false, false);

My initial searches failed because I was looking for phrases like "provision a web site using sharepoint object model" and the like. 

If you search for "Webs.Add()", you’ll find a number of very useful blog entries, MSDN articles and SDK documentation that go into depth on this subject.  I definitely recommend this site.

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Integrate SharePoint Designer Workflows with Web Services

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I’ve been playing around with custom actions for SharePoint Designer for some time (see here for some detailed stuff, if that interests you).

In my current project, we need to do some fairly heavy lifting and we want to use declarative SPD workflow to manage the associated business process. 

Long story short, this is entirely possible.  I extended my Codeplex project to invoke a "helper service" and now we can invoke a web service directly from an SPD workflow. 

Here’s the signature:

 public string Dispatcher(
        Guid WebID, // Passed by the runtime environment
        Guid SiteID, // Passed by the runtime environment
        string ListID, // Passed by the RTE (don't know why this is a string, not a GUID)
        int ListItemID, // Passed by the RTE.
        string XmlMessage) // Passed by the user as declared in SPD.

This leverages the fact that we can get at important workflow information, like the site, list ID, etc.  This is well documented in several places for those of you interested in creating your own custom actions.  The idea is to extract the XML string as provided by the user to dispatch an appropriate procedure.  Fun stuff!

Sadly, this is obviously a one-way ticket down to "Loosey Goosey" anti-pattern land, but it’s better than hitting a brick wall 🙂

Is it an anti-pattern if you do it even though you know it’s an anti-pattern?

I hope to wrap this inside Codeplex in the near future.  If you’re interested in me doing so, give me poke (email or leave a comment) and I’ll be that more enthusiastic about doing it 🙂

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Sunday Funny: “I wonder if your password is …”

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I recently bought lunch for my brother (as usual) and we ended up talking about funny things that we did at our respective colleges.  At my alma mater, Lafayette College, the academic support IT department had a very inclusive way about it.  We were given a LOT of rope and I took advantage of that at times.

Two my favorite memories relate to my good friend, Gabe.  He had made the terrible mistake of telling people his freshman year that "I’m a freshman, but I have Sophomore standing" due to the various advanced placement classes he had taken, etc.  Many of us were similarly situated but we didn’t talk about it so much.  His senior year, when we introduced him to people, we’d say "This is Gabe.  He’s a Senior, but he has Sophomore standing".

The college had some Sun workstation/servers running X-Window.  They had gigantic monitors and the engineers used them for CAD and other boring engineer stuff.  We CS people used them to learn programming and, of course, to play games.

We didn’t like the computer-helpless engineers to much so one of our favorite things to do would be to telnet to the box they were on and run X-eye on them.  This would pop up a pair of eyes that followed the mouse around on the screen.  You could pop up even more and have literally a dozen or more of the X-eye applications running.  Try not to laugh out loud when a hapless engineer is trying to close X-eye after X-eye and muttering under his breath about it 🙂

We also played X-trek on those boxes.  To do that, you had to download the source, get various dependencies wherever you could find them and build it.  I wasn’t a sophisticated C programmer, but I could read header files.  I was looking through these and found directives like "#DEFINE MAX_TORPEDO_DISTANCE 10".  I played around with that increase range and power for phases and torpedoes, re-built it and then destroyed Gabe the next time we played.

Gabe was also a huge fan of a TV show called Blake’s 7.  I had never seen it, but that didn’t prevent me from insisting that Dr. Who is the superior show.  The arguments would get heated at times 🙂

One day, it occurred to me that I could probably guess his UNIX password.  I sat down next to him one day and announced in a loud tone, "I’m going to guess your password right now, Gabe."  "Yeah, right" was his answer.  I then logged in, entered his user id, turned to face him, typed and said out loud, "I wonder if it’s B-L-A-K-E-7" ?  Touch typing has never paid off as handsomely as it did that day.

Next week (or soon): More computer room antics from college. 

Do you have any to share?  Leave a comment or email me and I’ll publish them here. 

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Minor Public Announcement: Windows Live Security Settings and Contacting Space Owners

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I receive a handful of messages from individuals via the built-in "send a message" function Microsoft provides with live spaces (which also hosts my blog) every month.

About one third of the time, those users have secured their live spaces account such that I cannot reply.  This is some kind of anti-spam feature I assume.

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Simple Explanation: “Value does not fall within the expected range.”

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UPDATE: An anonymous poster left a great comment about internal names.  Be sure to read it.

When working with event receivers and other code that references SharePoint list items via the object model, I often make mistakes that generate this error at runtime:

Error loading and running event receiver Conchango.xyzzyEventReceiver in xyzzy, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=0dc50a750396c3ac. Additional information is below.  : Value does not fall within the expected range.    

I think this is a fairly generic error that is potentially caused many different ways.  However, one simple explanation is that I’m referencing a field incorrectly.  If the name of the field is "Due Date", I must reference it like this in an event receiver:

properties.ListItem["Due Date"]

When I misspell or use the wrong case when referencing the field, SharePoint generates the above mentioned runtime error.  For example, this is wrong:

properties.ListItem["due Date"]

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End User Quick Tip: Sort Views in a Document Library, List, etc.

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We can, should and do create many views in SharePoint lists (document libraries, custom lists, etc).  SharePoint always lists available views in alphabetical order.  We cannot change this using out of the box functionality.  If it can be done via customization (and I’m not sure it can), it’s far to technical for your typical end user.

If you want to control the order in which SharePoint lists available views, simply prepend a number or letter to the view name, as in:

1 – By Material Type
2 – All Documents
3 – Due Date

-or-

A – By Material Type
B – All Documents
C – Due Date

I have also created views whose purpose is strictly to feed a KPI.  I have been following this naming convention:

Z_KPI_[description]

That causes my "KPI" views to appear at the bottom of the list.

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Sunday Funny: “When I Was a Little Boy”

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As a parent, somewhere along the line I discovered the "When I was a little boy" trick. 

My son, probably four or five at the time, was playing a balloon and like most little boys that play with balloons, he popped it.  He was very upset.  The world had come to an end.  I said to him, "when I was little boy, I had a balloon and it popped and eventually, I got a new balloon."  It seemed to help him cope with his loss and led to a fun talk about what it was like when I was a little boy.

That worked well as a consolation technique and I used it a several times over the next period of time.  I did get into trouble once when his Monster Rancher 3 creature died.  I talked about how my dog, Prince, had died in a car accident.  This time, his response was, "Now I feel bad about two things!"  I shied away from using the "when I was a little boy" technique for consolation after that.

Before the dead dog incident, however, I had also started to use the technique to convince him to do chores.  "When I was a little boy, I had to go out and get the newspaper", "clean my room", "get Mommy her coffee cup", etc.

This too was pretty successful for a while, but he started to increasingly rebel against the tyranny of my childhood.  One event, in particular, marked the end.  I told him to bring the garbage cans from curb back to the garage.  He argued and I responded, "When I was a little boy, I had to take the garbage back to the garage."  He responded, "Oh yeah!  Well when you were a little boy, that was STUPID!".

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Views and Columns on Lists and Document Libraries Cannot Be Secured

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UPDATE (02/29/08): This new codeplex project seems to provide a method for securing individual columns: http://www.codeplex.com/SPListDisplaySetting.  If you have any experience working with it, please leave a comment.

Forum posters frequently ask a question like this: "I have a manager view and and a staff view of a list.  How do I secure the manager view so that staff can not use it?"

They also frequently ask a related question: "I want to secure a specific metadata column so that only managers may edit that column while others may not even see it."

These  answers apply to both WSS 3.0 and MOSS:

  • SharePoint does not provide out-of-the-box support for securing views.
  • SharePoint does not provide out-of-the-box support for security columns.

There are several techniques one can follow to meet these kinds of security requirements.  Here’s what I can think of:

  • Use out-of-the-box item level security.  Views always honor item level security configuration.  Event receivers and/or workflow can automate security assignment.
  • Use personal views for "privileged" views.  These are easy enough to set up.  However, due to their "personal" nature, these need to be configured for each user.  Use standard security configuration to prevent anyone else from creating a personal view.
  • Use a data view web part and implement some kind of AJAXy security trimming solution.
  • Roll your own list display functionality and incorporate security trimming at the column level.
  • Modify the data entry forms and use JavaScript in conjunction with the security model to implement column-level security trimming.
  • Use an InfoPath form for data entry.  Implement column-level security trimming via web service calls to SharePoint and conditionally hide fields as needed.
  • Roll your own ASP.NET data entry function that implements column level security trimming.

None of those options are really that great, but there is at least a path to follow if you need to, even if it’s hard.

NOTE: If you go down any of these paths, don’t forget about "Actions -> Open with Windows Explorer".  You want to be sure that you test with that feature to make sure that it doesn’t work as a "back door" and defeat your security scheme.

If you have other ideas for or experiences with securing columns or views, please email me or leave a comment and I’ll update this posting as appropriate.

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Quick Tip: BDC ADF Version Numbers Are Your Friend

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If you’re hand-coding ADF files and doing a lot of code/import/test cycles, use the version number to make your life easier. 

I hate to admit it, but until this week, I was always deleting the ADF and re-importing it.  This would break my business data columns and make me re-wire them.  All unnecessary.

File this under "it’s obvious once you see it".

Example:

<LobSystem
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/03/BusinessDataCatalog BDCMetadata.xsd"
  Type="WebService"
  Version="1.2.0.0" Name="xyzzyDocumentReview"
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/03/BusinessDataCatalog">

Change that version and re-import and the existing business data column uses the updated version automatically with no additional configuration required.

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Solution: BDC Picker Shows Only One Column Of Results

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In my on-going attempts at providing a more useful lookup column using BDC, I hit a wall with the BDC picker.  If you haven’t see it, the BDC picker is similar to a people picker except that it works with columns of type "business data".

You access the picker by clicking on the open book icon of a business data column as shown:

image

The above image shows a business data column called "Master Document Id".  That column is connected, via BDC, to a web service.  The web service returns two columns of information: Document ID and Title.  The business purpose here is to provide a "this document is based on" function.  Users select a "master" document and when they save, an event receiver copies meta data fields from the referenced master.

By default, the BDC picker looks like this when I search for a document whose ID = "38":

clip_image002

That’s helpful, but not good enough.  People don’t think in terms of IDs, they think in terms of titles and/or other meta data.  The picker allows you to search on other columns (e.g. Title) but won’t show the actual list of titles it found, just their DocId’s as shown here:

clip_image002[1]

(The screen shot isn’t so great because I didn’t pick a search that returns any valid results, but you can see that if it had found some results, it would only have shown DocId’s, not titles).

I searched high and low for the answer to this and failed.  My colleague, the venerable Jonathan Bradshaw, had faced and solved this issue.  When I reached out to him for help, he pointed me in the right direction.

Configure the picker to show multiple columns via the "ShowInPicker" property in the ADF:

         <Property Name="ShowInPicker" Type="System.Boolean">true</Property>

In more detail:

  <!-- Title -->
  <TypeDescriptor TypeName="System.String" Name="Title" >
    <LocalizedDisplayNames>
      <LocalizedDisplayName LCID="1033">Title</LocalizedDisplayName>
    </LocalizedDisplayNames>
    <Properties>
      <Property Name="DisplayByDefault" Type="System.Boolean">true</Property>
      <Property Name="ShowInPicker" Type="System.Boolean">true</Property>
    </Properties>
  </TypeDescriptor>

Setting this property does introduce a minor problem.  As soon as you set it once, you need to set it for every column you want to show.  In my case, BDC picker showed DocId by default.  However, once I added "ShowInPicker" to Title, DocId no longer displayed.  I solved that by explicitly setting the ShowInPicker property for Doc ID.

Here is the result:

image

(I’ll explain the odd-looking "168 – CamlSchema.xsd" construction in a future blog post.  In short, it’s a concatenated string that allows for a slightly better user experience).

Of course, having written this blog entry, I just did a search for "ShowInPicker" and found numerous hits, including this one: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms583986.aspx.  It explains the meaning of that property along with some other good BDC stuff.

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