A quick link to Joel who has posted a good article on thoughts for the future - how we should look at development.

Funnily, this sits well with some of things we are starting to do - using xsl, in-built (or sometimes custom) web services to provide the interfaces to provide functinality rather than dll based web parts

Firstly, huge kudos to Iain for reminding me of this today

When you want to use teh 'Changed' event on a drop down list (or other control) in a browser based InfoPath form, you have to set the postback options to 'Always' = otherwise your event doesnt fire!

Thanks Iain

For those that haven't yet looked at Powershell, please do. Aside from being an extremely powerful means to interact with SharePoint and control items that are not available from the web UI, it is more than likely that as with Exchange, Powershell will be the means of interacting with SharePoint v.next (as opposed to stsadm)

Some links to interesting resources and example scripts....

http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/karine/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=9

http://darrinbishop.com/blog/archive/2007/04/08/54.aspx

http://blogs.flexnetconsult.co.uk/colinbyrne/PermaLink,guid,1665700b-e0de-4b8a-bb1c-014d6fbcf2db.aspx

Powershell download

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/download.mspx

Useful Powershell editor

http://www.powergui.org

A recent prototype involved creating a ‘Whats New’ web part. This was required to display a total of the new of recent new content and the latest 5 items.

We had a number of options when creating this, but we chose to build it quickly using SharePoint Designer and the Search web service.

Before we start, a note on the use of SharePoint designer.
There is a lot of debate about when (or even if) this tool should be used, but for me it is a great tool to write xslt and transform web services. It can do a heck of a lot even before you start jumping in and typing xslt. I use it on development servers only and export the created web part. If you want to use designer on your live servers then please research and understand the implications of ghosted / unghosted pages.

OK – our webpart. The key to this prototype is the SharePoint search webservice. In this case, I’m using search.asmx (the MOSS search) rather than spsearch.asmx.

Why use search.asmx?

Our prototype (and many client implementations) are comprised of multiple site collections. Becuse of this, out of the box tools like the Content Query Web Part or 3rd party tools like Jan Tielmans ‘Whats New’ part wouldn’t help us as they only work across the current site collection.
Another thing to note – using search.asmx means we are getting security trimmed results – you are only seeing new items that you have access to.
I’m assuming that readers of this will know and understand how to open pages, add data sources and the basic principles of XSLT
In designer, our first task is to hook onto the search service. It’s accessed via the URL ‘http://<portal>/_vti_bin/search.asmx. For details on the service, look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms470518.aspx. We are adding a WebService datasource. Check out http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA101171541033.aspx  for details on doing this

Once accessed, we are going to use the QueryEx method. There is a similar Query method that will return an XML formatted result packet, but QueryEx will allow us to work with the resulting dataset inside Designer.

After connecting, we have to pass our search query (the QueryXML property). We can pass a complex SQL (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb219479.aspx ). In our case, we are going to ask for all content created within the last 7 days.

The query we used was...

An important note – the QueryXML property is a complete XML string, we can’t just pass the query itself. The string above has been split across multiple lines to adi readability but when entering we have to enter as a single row

Once input, click on the DataView and choose Show Data.

 
If all is well, we should see a dataset result, similar to the screen below. Note – if there is no new content, no results!

Now we have the data, we can quickly build our webpart.
Firstly, click in a webpart zone on the page and add a basic DataView using the fields TITLE, WRITE and DESCRIPTION.
I now changed some properties. I changed the layout to the second option (rather than the default row/column view).

We also changed the sort options to sore by WRITE (so we are showing the latest content in date descending order)

Parameters

I added some parameters to make adding to other servers slightly easier. These were for More Details link, images path, maximum number of items etc as seen below

Showing the number of new items...
In the <xsl:template name="dvt_1"> template, I added a new row and inside the row put the following....

Showing Icons

The next change was to include the icons to represent the type of content. These icons are those used in standard search results.
Inside the <xsl:template name="dvt_1.rowview"> template, we added the following....(extract only)

From this you should see that we are interrogating the CONTENTCLASS property and mapping an image to it. Again, this is similar to search and fortunately, there are a lot of icons that map direct to the CONTENTCLASS

Formatting the title and update date

We format the title as a link. This is a simple xslt in the format of

 we are using the $MoreDetailsLink parameter for the URL and the Title for the display text.
For the date, we are applying the DD-MMM-YY hh:mm format using

For both of the above, you can get Designer to do this for you. Right click the text you want to format and then you can choose the format options –e.g. hyperlink, datetime etc.

We set the properties of the DataView web part to set the maximum number of items to 5, then in the opening of the XSLT we set

you can see we are setting the maximum number of items to a parameter value. We do this so that we only need to modify parameters in the Web UI rather than asking administrators to open the XSLT in future.

Finally, in the template, we added another row to link to a more details page.

This is our prototype linked to a page that contained as similar web part, but was showing all results and had pagination etc.

You can download a version of the prototype web part here. As always, be aware that this is a prototype and the normal disclaimers apply (e.g. make sure this web part goes through a code review before putting onto a production server).

Whats_New.zip (3.65 kb)

DataForm web parts enabled us to put forms onto pages that can interact with SharePoint lists. Why would we want to do this? well one example is that we can hide the list and it's URL's , another is that the form can be designed to contain custom logic, be pre-populated with data (e.g. from the query string) or simply to only show a limited number of fields.

I use SharePoint Designer to create these as it a a great tool to manipulate the XSLT required. However, by default, Designer will use the list GUID to connect to the list. This poses a problem - when we transfer this webpart to another server (staging / live etc) the GUID will be different.

However, with a small amount of editing of the source, we can make the webpart work on other servers.

The changes required are...

a) In the DataSources string, replace
ParameterKey="ListID" DefaultValue="{YOUR_GUID}" Name="ListID"
with
ParameterKey="ListName" DefaultValue="YOUR_LIST_NAME" Name="ListName".
Note you must do this for each action e.g. UpdateParameters, DeleteParameters

b) In the ParameterBing string replace
ParameterBing Name="ListID" Location="None" DefaultValue="{YOUR_GUID}"
with
ParameterBing Name="ListName" Location="None" DefaultValue="{YOUR_LIST_NAME}"

c) In the main xslt, change
<xsl:param name="ListID">{YOUR GUID}</xsl:param>
to
<xsl:param name="ListName">YOUR_LIST_NAME</xsl:param>

I travel by train  to the office regularly now. Although this sometimes takes longer than driving, it is more consistent and it gives a couple of hours a day where I can do some reading without interuption (plus I feel I'm doing my bit for the planet! :) )

This will seem geeky, but I get fed up listening to CD's or the radio (though Classic FM is a great soother) and have recently started getting the SharePoint podcasts. personally I find the podcasts easier than webcasts (perhaps because I don't have the distraction of the PC?). You can download the mp3's or find them via iTunes

These are hosted by our friends at Lightning and have some great content for developers and administrators.

AS part of our planned expansion and due to the increasing projects, we are looking to hire again.

If you have skills and experience in one (or ideally more) of the following, then we would love to hear from you...

• asp.net web development (not necessarily SharePoint specific but web services, controls, linq, ajax, script etc)
• SQL 2000 - 2008 (Database Administration, Analysis Services, Reporting Services, development)
• InfoPath Forms (Client and Browser based forms, customised programming)
• Windows Workflow Foundation (SharePoint workflows, long running workflows, using the foundation for business logic)
• Design (concept design, html, css, general graphics)
• SharePoint architecture (creating portals, configuration, customisation, configuring web parts)
• PowerShell
• Project Management and Client Management

We offer a realistic package with opportunities to extend your skills - Conferences, MS Certification, User Groups, Networking etc. The roles are based in our Wolerhampton office with occaisional travel to client sites.

If you are interested, then contact us

Quite often you will need to customise the search results and ensure that your custom metadata mappings are displaying correctly.

To view the raw results, I undertake the following...

a) Edit the results page (results, or people depending on what you are looking to modify

b) Add a new core results web part (again people or results)

c) Add your columns, fixed queries etc

d) Click the Edit XSLT button and replace the XSLT with the following

Save everything and you can now see the raw results.

Following the previous post on search, this shows how to simply and quickly show a single users profile details on a page. Note, that this intended for MOSS (where we have the profile database) but could be re-worked for WSS to show details from the user list.

On our page, we need to add the People Search Core Results Part

Once added, open the web part properties so we can configure the part. We need to make several changes....

a) Under the Results Display / View group, set the Results Default View to Relveance and Results per page to 1

b) Under the Results Query Options group, change the Cross Web Part Query ID to Query 2 (see also note below)

c) Under the Miscellanous group, uncheck all the options except  Show Search Results

d) Finally, in the Fixed Keyword Query option, enter the query required (e.g. LastName:Piper)

Save the changes.

The final result will be basic details from the profile databse about our user

If the appearance needs to be changed, then you can edit the XSLT (another future post I think!) to suit.

Note - you may need more than one profile - in this case, the Cross Web Part Query ID needs to unique for each part on the page.

If you have more than 3 user profiles to display, then consider using different queries to get multiple results. For example, to show all users who have the property Department:Sales to show all sales members. If doing this, the number of search results should be increased from 1!

The recent platform update to WSS and MOSS has bought into play Search Server 2008. Whilst very powerful on it's own. it allows us now to provide roll up funcitonality inside WSS or MOSS.

Previously, roll ups were undertaken using Content Query Web Part, Third Party solutions like our friends at Bamboo or other custom components. For those who don't know what we mean by roll up, it is to take a central view on all content of certain type / property, e.g. all announcements from all webs in all site collections. The diagram below summarises...

Now I was going to type a long blog on how we did it using Search, but to save my fingers (or at least for the moment) take a look at DevCow

Of course, the beauty of the latest infrastructure update is that we now can roll up on the WSS platform.

Search is very powerful, not just for user defined results, but also for other tasks like that above. Hopefully, the next blog post will be a single persons profile, or displaying Business Data Catalog info

UPDATE - October

Something I forgot to mention when I posted the article was that using the normal Search Results web parts, there is a limit on how many items you can display at once without pagination