Content Query Web Parts and Site Categories

2007-03-092014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Rollup, CQWP, SP2007 Admin, SP2007 DevelopmentLeave a comment

Here’s a thought – wouldn’t it be cool to have a way of getting content from Sites in a Site Collection, but filtered by their category data?

At the moment, the Content Query Web Part gives you 3 options as to what sites it queries:

A specific site
This site and its children
All sites in the collection

Wouldn’t it be great, though, to form that list of target sites based on a category? For example, in a big company it may have a number of divisions, each with their own ‘Finance’ department. A content query web part that could show content from all the ‘Finance’ category sites across the organisation would be very cool.

Can’t see a way of doing it at the moment though. I suppose I could write my own web-part – but the Content Query Web Part gives you so much already, I don’t want to have to replicate that.

Master Pages for Admin and global pages

2007-02-222014-11-30 Andy BurnsApplication Pages, Master Pages, SP2007 BrandingLeave a comment

One of the pains about master pages in SharePoint is that when you set one for a site, it doesn’t apply to the admin pages. This can lead to a, um, interesting difference in appearance.

I started looking into overcoming this. Obviously, there is a fairly straight-forward approach – modify the application.master. Ouch. Then, any changes to design in one file have to be replicated elsewhere, with one file in the Master Page Gallery, and one on the file system.

Alternatively, I found a neat solution at David’s blog. This uses an HTTP Module to reset the master page for any pages looking for application.master.

But after following his instructions, my admin pages wouldn’t work. I just got the error page ‘Unknown Error’.

Digging into the logs, I found what was going on – there were 2 content placeholders that the application.master uses which weren’t on my ‘normal’ master page. Make sure you add place holders for:

<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderPageDescriptionRowAttr" runat="server"/> <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderPageDescriptionRowAttr2" runat="server"/>

The full list of placeholders used in both files is:

PlaceHolderPageTitle
PlaceHolderAdditionalPageHead
PlaceHolderBodyAreaClass
PlaceHolderBodyLeftBorder
PlaceHolderBodyRightMargin
PlaceHolderCalendarNavigator
PlaceHolderFormDigest
PlaceHolderGlobalNavigation
PlaceHolderGlobalNavigationSiteMap
PlaceHolderLeftActions
PlaceHolderLeftNavBar
PlaceHolderLeftNavBarBorder
PlaceHolderLeftNavBarDataSource
PlaceHolderLeftNavBarTop
PlaceHolderMain
PlaceHolderMiniConsole
PlaceHolderNavSpacer
PlaceHolderPageDescription
PlaceHolderPageImage
PlaceHolderPageTitleInTitleArea
PlaceHolderSearchArea
PlaceHolderSiteName
PlaceHolderTitleAreaClass
PlaceHolderTitleAreaSeparator
PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb
PlaceHolderTitleLeftBorder
PlaceHolderTitleRightMargin
PlaceHolderTopNavBar
PlaceHolderUtilityContent
SPNavigation
WSSDesignConsole
PlaceHolderHorizontalNav Normal master page only
PlaceHolderPageDescriptionRowAttr Admin master page only
PlaceHolderPageDescriptionRowAttr2 Admin master page only

The format of Dates in CAML

2007-02-212014-11-30 Andy BurnsCAML, SP2007 DevelopmentLeave a comment

So, a colleague asked me about what format dates should be put into the where clause of a CAML query as. I’d had a lot of problems finding this out myself, and ultimately I found that a .ToString(“u”) on a DateTime object did the trick. The produces a time of the form 2006-04-17 21:29:09Z

For example, using a StringBuilder to create my CAML query (for my SPQuery object), this might look like:

caml.Append("<Leq>"); caml.Append("<FieldRef Name='MyDueDate'/>"); caml.Append("<Value Type='DateTime'>"); caml.Append(System.DateTime.Today.ToString("u")); caml.Append("</Value>"); caml.Append("</Leq>");

(This query contains the date contained in the MyDueDate column with the current date and time).

Building a Base Web Part Class

2007-02-212014-11-30 Andy BurnsSP2007 DevelopmentLeave a comment

From Bob Mixon’s blog:

Part I, Part II, Part III

MOSS Branding link dump from Angus Logan

2007-02-212014-11-30 Andy BurnsSP2007 BrandingLeave a comment

Dump of links to do with MOSS Branding from Angus Logan. Lots of stuff from Shane Perran in there – yup, I’ve been reading a lot of his posts now that I’m trying to rebrand a site.

Best Practices Analyser

2007-02-212014-11-30 Andy BurnsSP2007 AdminLeave a comment

From Stefan Gossner’s blog – a tool to analyse your MOSS system

SharePoint Licensing

2007-02-212014-11-30 Andy BurnsLicensing, SP2007 Admin, SP2007 Architecture, Web Content ManagementLeave a comment

Found on Cornelius Van Dyk’s blog – SharePoint Licensing Information. Interesting stuff. No, wait, the other thing – tedious. Still, quite how you license your Internet facing WCM site did strike me as an interesting issue, especially as one of my colleagues kept going on about having external sites as ‘read only’. What, no feedback forms? Comments? Survey submissions? Well, it seems that the definition is one of accessibility – so long as everyone can access these features, you can use an Internet access license. I wondered how they’d deal with that.

(For content accessible to employees/partners only, I presume it’d be a normal client access license).

Update: See the Logical Architecture Model: Corporate Deployment document for details on this, and dealing with partners. That’s quite interesting – you can host partners sites on Internet or Intranet farms.