The Importance of knowing Regular Expressions

2013-01-122014-11-30 Andy BurnsDevelopment, regex, SP20132 Comments

It’s something that always mystifies me, it does seem that a lot of developers don’t know regular expression syntax very well. This came up when I was on some SharePoint 2013 training just before Christmas.

SharePoint 2013 introduces something called “Routing Rules”. These are rules that allow you to direct traffic to different front-end servers (or pools of servers), allowing you to isolate traffic, route to better health servers, etc.. Spence Harbar has a very good article about it.

Anyway, one some of the criteria that you can match rules on are Regular Expressions. However, SharePoint does warn you that Regex routing rules are slower – this is unsurprising. But how much slower than, say, a ‘Starts with’ or ‘Ends with’ rule? And on the Ignite training I did wonder about the efficiency of their example… Continue reading “The Importance of knowing Regular Expressions” →

Annoying Exporting a list to Excel

2012-11-212014-11-30 Andy BurnsExcel, Lists, SP2010 Admin1 Comment

SharePoint lists have the ability to export their contents to an Excel Workbook.

This is quite cute – it gives the users a way to get the data out into something they’re familiar with, can manipulate and can print. However, I was having an issue. Using a list based on a Custom List (above), one of my columns (Enquiry) wasn’t exported:

I wondered at first if this was because of it’s column type (Hyperlink), or because I’d created the column programmatically. Then, on a hunch really, I tried changing the column order. I added another column before it in the list view. I used the ID column, but any should work. When I exported the list – all the columns I wanted came through (but the ID column didn’t).

What I think is going on here is that if you used the same export on a document library then typically – though not always – the first column is an icon for the type of file it is. My suspicion is that some muppet, when writing the export to excel, realised that they’d have these icons, and decided to avoid them by excluding the first column. This is unfortunate for two reasons:

Not all lists have icons – witness my Custom List
Not all document libraries have the file icon as the first column.

For now the resolution would be to have another column as the first on your list.

BeforeProperties and AfterProperties

2012-11-212014-11-30 Andy BurnsEvent Receivers, SP2007 Development, SP2010 Development, SPItemEventReceiverLeave a comment

I am sick of having to hunt down the link to Synergy’s post on the BeforeProperties and AfterProperties available in different events on SPListItems. For my reference, here it is:

List:

List	BeforeProperties	AfterProperties	properties.ListItem
ItemAdding	No value	New value	Null
ItemAdded	No value	New value	New value
ItemUpdating	No value	Changed value	Original value
ItemUpdated	No value	Changed value	Changed value
ItemDeleting	No value	No value	Original value
ItemDeleted	No value	No value	Null

Document Library:

Library	BeforeProperties	AfterProperties	properties.ListItem
ItemAdding	No value	No value	Null
ItemAdded	No value	No value	New value
ItemUpdating	Original value	Changed value	Original value
ItemUpdated	Original value	Changed value	Changed value
ItemDeleting	No value	No value	Original value
ItemDeleted	No value	No value	Null

Note: Allegedly, this does change if the event receiver is synchronous – the before properties are available. I’ve not checked this out yet.

Obviously, for SharePoint 2007 systems that doesn’t apply – as ‘*ed’ event receivers are always asynchronous.

ContentIterator – Curious Behaviour, and Infinite looping

2012-11-012014-11-30 Andy BurnsContentIterator, SP2010 DevelopmentLeave a comment

I like the ContentIterator control – it’s a nice way of being able to process a lot of items in SharePoint. However, sometimes it’s behaviour is … strange.

I had been using it to loop over some (but not all) the items in a list. Some changes meant that I was now going to loop over all the items. I had a list with 500 items that I was testing with. My code was:

ContentIterator ci = new ContentIterator("example");
SPQuery qry = new SPQuery();
qry.Query = ContentIterator.ItemEnumerationOrderByNVPField;
ci.ProcessListItems(list,qry, ProcessItem, ProcessItemError);

This would process the first 200 items, over and over. It never reached an end. Hmm. Continue reading “ContentIterator – Curious Behaviour, and Infinite looping” →

Delete Event Receiver from a Content Type with Code

2012-10-102014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Type, Event Receivers, SP2010 Development, SPContentType, SPItemEventReceiverLeave a comment

SharePoint allows you to attach event receivers to content types. That’s pretty handy. Unfortunately, deleting event receivers from those content types is much more hard. Perhaps this is why the Document ID feature fails to remove the content types that it adds. However, here is one possible approach.

SPContentType ctype = site.RootWeb.ContentTypes[SPBuiltInContentTypeId.Document];
if (ctype != null)
{
 if (ctype.EventReceivers != null)
 {
   bool bContinueDelete = true;
   while (bContinueDelete)
   {
     if (ctype.EventReceivers.Count < 1)
     {
       bContinueDelete = false;
     }
     else
     {
     bool bFoundOne = false;
     foreach (SPEventReceiverDefinition d in ctype.EventReceivers)
     {
         //Could match on the Type of the event receiver, but for this example, let's use name
         if (d.Name.Contains("Document ID"))
         {
           d.Delete();
           ctype.Update(true, false);
           bFoundOne = true;
           break;
         }
     }
     if (!bFoundOne)
     {
       bContinueDelete = false;
     }
   }
 }
}

More on why this is important in a later post.

Slow Site Creation in SharePoint 2010

2012-10-052014-11-30 Andy BurnsSP2010 Admin, STSADMLeave a comment

I have a development machine that I was creating a number of sites within. I wanted to create about 10,000 sites or so (and have done more than that in testing before without a problem). When I started the process that was creating these running on my machine it was taking about 20 seconds per site. After a mere 2000 sites, it was then talking 30 minutes per site. Something isn’t right.

I did a bit of digging and found that others have had the same problem – but no solution.

I then spoke to one of our administrators, and he suggest clearing out the ‘event cache’ table. I’d never heard of that (and I’ve no idea how he found out about it), but his advice was:

Minimise the amount of rows in the EventCache SQL table:

set ChangeLogRetentionPeriod to 1 day (1.00:00:00) on web application

set EventLogRetentionPeriod to 1 day (1.00:00:00) on web application

set ‘Change Log’ timer job to run daily (default is weekly)

Okay, so I did this using STSADM:

stsadm -o setproperty -pn change-log-retention-period -pv 1 stsadm -o setproperty -pn event-log-retention-period -pv 1

…and I then changed the Change Log timer job’ schedule in central admin, and set it running right away.

The timer job took about 8 minutes to run. That was a surprisingly long time.

When I then tried creating a site, it took 7 minutes. Clearly, this is still an unwell system, but that’s a lot better than 30 minutes. I’ll update if I find more.

Deploy a solution to the sandbox in C#

2012-08-152014-11-30 Andy BurnsSP2010 Development, SPSolutionLeave a comment

I came across a question on StackOverflow about how to programmatically deploy a sandbox solution, and this seemed a good question. Here’s what I came up with…

Continue reading “Deploy a solution to the sandbox in C#” →

CQWP and Discussions

2012-08-082014-11-30 Andy BurnsCQWP, SP2010 Development, XSLLeave a comment

Hmm. Interesting problem – I had a Content Query Web Part (CQWP) that was displaying the Title for Discussions. Unfortunately when you clicked on them, they took you to the display form for the start of the thread, not the entire thing:

Okay, but could I get it to link to a view of the discussion thread itself?

Continue reading “CQWP and Discussions” →

Programmatically evaluate SPWebApplication Policies

2012-08-032014-11-30 Andy BurnsSP2010 Development, SPWebApplicationLeave a comment

An interesting question came up on StackOverflow – how do you get the web application level policies for a Web app? In other words, the rights that you can grant to an entire web application (via central administration) – how do you get those in code?

Continue reading “Programmatically evaluate SPWebApplication Policies” →

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