One thing that it can be useful to do sometimes is create documents in a library, possibly with some metadata. I find that I sometimes end up doing this from a console app, just to put in some example information:
string filePath = ...
string newName = ...
SPList library = ...
using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(filePath,FileMode.Open)){
SPFile file = library.RootFolder.Files.Add( newName ,fs, true );
SPListItem item = file.Item;
item["SomeField"] = "SomeValue";
item.Update();
}
Auditing with SharePoint 2007 is something that I’ve managed to avoid playing with until our current project. Frankly, this has mainly been because the user interface for audit details is inadequate out of the box. Most other systems, you just go to a page, and see what happened to that item.
Anyway now that I’ve started to take a look at it in more detail, I notice a few other minor problems with it… Continue reading “Observations on SharePoint 2007's irritating Audit”
So, I thought a little wrap up of what we’ve seen and how I figured all this out. Much of what we’ve looked it is just a simplified version of the standard ‘People and Groups’ pages, and a lot of digging around with reflector was involved!
We’ve seen:
Now the moment you’ve been waiting for – the code for the 3 pages we’ve used itself. Note that I’ve also used a custom Master page for my sites – you’ll want to build your own, with your own navigation, etc..
The final component in my users and groups UI is the ability to remove users. This is based very much on how SharePoint works – and it’s a little ugly. My apologies -but this is how SharePoint does it.
Our ListView shows our users. Each user has a checkbox next to them:
I’ve added a ‘Remove Users’ LinkButton to my fake ‘toolbar’:
That LinkButton is defined in my page as:
<asp:LinkButton UseSubmitBehavior="false" id="BtnRemoveUsersFromGroup" runat="server"
Text="Remove Users"
OnClick="BtnRemoveUsersFromGroup_Click"
OnClientClick="return BtnRemoveUsersClick();"
/>
So, on click it runs some client script, and then posts back a click event. So, how do you know which users have been selected within the postback? You could have zero-to-N checkboxes! Continue reading “How I simplified the Users and Group UI – Removing Users”
So, in the previous posts we’ve looked at how to resolve a MembershipGroupId for a group (or at least, one way of doing so), and how to list users. Now, how do we add new users to our group?
Well, on our ‘list of users’ page, I have what looks like a a SharePoint toolbar. It’s actually just a table cunningly formatted to look like a toolbar, and the ‘Add users’ link on it is a LinkButton. In the codebehind it’s click event is:
protected void BtnAddUsersToGroup_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
int iGroup = (int)ViewState[GROUP];
SPUtility.Redirect("SimpleUG/AddUsers.aspx?MembershipGroupId=" + iGroup, SPRedirectFlags.RelativeToLayoutsPage, this.Context);
}
So, all we’re doing is going to a page called ‘AddUsers’ and passing the MembershipGroupId again. Continue reading “How I simplified the Users and Group UI – Adding Users”
So, one of the things I skipped over in my last post was just how you get the MembershipGroupID for the group you want the users to administer. Well, there are lots of options – all you’ve got to do is get to your page with the ListView with the correct value for the GET parameter MembershipGroupId.
If you knew the ID in advance, you could hard code it. I didn’t, so I used a redirect page. Continue reading “How I simplified the Users and Group UI – Resolve the MembershipGroupID”
Listing users in my page was actually the easiest bit of the whole solution. In the ASP of my page, I added:
<SharePoint:ListView id="UserListView" ListID="UserInfo" runat="server"/>
And my page showed:
This is a SharePoint ListView, and the id and ListID appear to be ‘magic’ values. If set as above, the web part will display the users in the group specified by the MembershipGroupId GET parameter for the page. Try it – go to the normal users and groups pages, to to view the members of a group, and try replacing the integer ID of the group. (Not all are used)
So, that bit of magic shows me the list of users. In my page’s OnLoad event I also read the MembershipGroupId parameter and used that to read the name of the group we’re editting, which I then used in the PageTitle area. We’ll see this later.
(My Site is called ‘Blank’ and we’re editing the ‘Blank Members’ group)
That’s all I needed really, but as a bonus I’m also going to describe how I added the View Control. Continue reading “How I simplified the Users and Group UI – Listing Users”
Previously, I’d blogged about a simplified Users and Groups UI for SharePoint. I really annoys me that the standard one is so complex – I’m a techy, and a specialist, and it confuses me! I’m not sure what chance non-specialist admins will have.
The worst part is, though, often users just want to add or remove users from a pretty limited set of groups. I mean, this is implied by the standard ‘Visitors/Members/Owners’ groups on a site. Unfortunately, there are often a lot of other groups, and other complexities shown through the standard user interface in SharePoint.
For a Case Management system we’ve been working on, I built a simplified user interface. The idea was to make it easy for non-techies to add and remove users from specific groups. They weren’t to have access to all groups, and this wasn’t to replace the ordinary People and Groups pages – so more technical staff could still use those too. What I came up with is shown below.
It appears similar, initially – but the navigation on the left is the same as for the rest of our case site. Only the relevant groups (“Case Workers” and “Case Owners“) are linked to on the left, and these links are only shown to users who can edit the groups (Home and Audit aren’t related to people and groups). Also, the menus on this page only let users add or remove users – which is all they should need to do.
Note that the “Case Workers” and “Case Owners” groups are just the groups we happened to be using – you could build this to work for others, depending on your needs.
I built this user interface using 3 application pages put into the _layouts directory. They’re actually Code Behind ASPX pages, and so this is a Visual Studio solution, though some sections of the application could be built in SharePoint Designer.
The pages themselves are for:
The solution is a little complicated, so I’m going to break it down into pieces:
While working on pre-filling ListItem fields on an item, I became a bit puzzled. The SPItemEventProperties.AfterProperties collection is a dictionary which can contain the named value for one of the fields of the item. In other words, if we wanted to set a value “Tax Area” to “Europe” we’d do:
properties.AfterProperties["Tax Area"] = "Europe";
In our case, however, we didn’t know what these properties were before hand. Rather, we were ‘inheriting’ values from a parent folder. Thus, we were going to use the parent folder’s SPField object for each field to define the value. I started out using:
properties.AfterProperties[parentField.Title] = parentItem[parentField.id];
But is Title the right property to use? Well, having looked through a number of blog posts, this seems to be the subject of some confusion.
At first Title is okay to use. However, you can change the display name of the field. For example, we could change our field’s Title to ‘Tax Region’ – but we still need to use ‘Tax Area’ in our AfterProperties collection.
So, InternalName is the right property of the SPField to use – but there is a hiccup. The InternalName is encoded – Tax_x0020_Area – so you have to unescape it like I’ve talked about before.
The summary is, then, use the unescaped InternalName in your AfterProperties collection.
If you’re a SharePoint Dev you’re bound to come across the curious escaping used in some text. Text like:
Hello World
Gets encoded to:
Hello_x0020_World
So what’s the _x0020_ number about? Well, hex 20 is the UTF value for a space, and x0020 represents that space. I guess the underscores are delimiters. The reason for this escaping is that XML element names can’t have a space.
How would I encode or decode this? Well, the clue is in the phrase ‘XML element names’. You can use:
Both are static.
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