We’ve started to use SmartAssembly to obfuscate the code for some of the SharePoint products that we’ve been working on, and I’d had a few problems with it. Continue reading “Adding SmartAssembly obfuscation to a Visual Studio Project”
Software Development
Disable Output Escaping in XSL
Really, just a reminder for myself, but if you work with SharePoint long enough you’re bound to end up using something like the Content Query Web Part or a Data View Web Part to aggregate and output a rich text source – but all your HTML gets escaped, so it appears content on the page.
The command you want is DisableOutputEscaping:
<xsl:value-of select="somevalue" disable-output-escaping="yes" />
This will cause the HTML to be output unescaped – i.e. as HTML.
Side note: Sometimes people want things like the CQWP to show the first part of the content as a ‘summary’. This trucating content to display in the CQWP or DVWP is difficult; either a) you risk having unfinished tags in the HTML you do emit, or b) you have to strip out all HTML, which can ruin your formatting. a) is a particular problem, as unfinished <table> tags can cause all sorts of weirdness on page.
My preferred option is to have a additional ‘summary text’ box that accepts plain text, and have the author generate the summary manually. That way we avoid outputting HTML like that entirely.
Random things I learnt doing a code review
Code Reviews are interesting – both sides can learn something, and the one I’ve just done taught me a few things… Continue reading “Random things I learnt doing a code review”
Requirements (and SharePoint)
Less of a technical post, but something I harp on about daily in the office – Requirements. Continue reading “Requirements (and SharePoint)”
Converting Enumerations
I love Enums – but I always have to look up how to convert them to one thing or another – so a reminder for myself:
Here’s my enumeration:
public enum MyEnum
{
Alpha,
Beta,
Gamma
}
And the conversions (each enumeration item has a value (e.g. 1) and a string (e.g. “Beta”):
MyEnum someEnum = MyEnum.Beta; //Convert to String string someEnumString = someEnum.ToString(); //Convert to MyEnum again MyEnum someEnum2 = (MyEnum)Enum.Parse(typeof(MyEnum), someEnumString); //Convert to int value int someEnumInt = (int)someEnum; //Convert int to My Enum again MyEnum someEnum3 = (MyEnum)someEnumInt;
Getting levels of the SharePoint Heirarchy and their Exceptions
Something that I have to do time and again is get some element of SharePoint’s heirarchy, such as a site collection, site, list or item. This is pretty typical – that’s why we all use USING to ensure proper disposal of SPSites and SPWebs, right? But what happens if the thing you’re after isn’t there? What exception get’s thrown? Well, this should be pretty clear:
try
{
//FileNotFoundException if doesn't exist
using (SPSite site = new SPSite(siteGuid))
{
//FileNotFoundException if doesn't exist
using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb(webGuid))
{
//SPException if doesn't exist
SPList list = web.Lists[listGuid];
//ArgumentException if doesn't exist
SPListItem item = list.GetItemByUniqueId(itemGuid);
}
}
}
catch (System.IO.FileNotFoundException fileEx2)
{
// Site or Site Collection Not Found
}
catch (SPException spEx2)
{
// List not found
}
catch (ArgumentException argEx2)
{
// Item not found
}
Hopefully that might prove useful to someone – and a good reminder for me.
Silverlight in SharePoint 'Hello World' demo
I’ve not used Silverlight, and I though it might be interesting to try the Silverlight Web Part from SharePoint 2010, so I came up with a little ‘hello world’ project. Using Silverlight, I wanted to:
- Query a SharePoint List for data
- Display that data
Not exactly complicated stuff, but I figured it would be a start. I decided to query a Picture Library, and display the pictures in my web part, changing the displayed image every few seconds. All of this is very achievable with JavaScript or jQuery and the Content Query Web Part (as some sort of variant on the CQTWP I built), so I thought this would be a good comparison. Continue reading “Silverlight in SharePoint 'Hello World' demo”
Make Visual Studio break on all Exceptions
I’m a big fan of not raising exceptions if possible – rather than throwing and catching ‘expected exceptions’. To me, that phrase is an oxymoron – exceptions should be, um, exceptional, and it can make the wood hard to see for the trees when looking for proper exceptions.
Anyway, that aside – you can make Visual Studio break on any exception, not just the unhandled ones. Use Ctrl-Alt-E to edit – there is supposed to be some way to get to it though the menu, but I’ve not found it. Discovered in a blog post here.
C# Code to send an email
I’ve been doing some testing of email enabled lists, and I needed to send quite a lot of emails, so I wrote a little console app to do it. Here’s the core of the code I used, in case I need it again, or it’s useful to someone. It uses System.Net.Mail:
SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient(@"vm-moss2007.virtual.local");
for (int i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
{
MailMessage message = new MailMessage("administrator@virtual.local", <a href="mailto:testlist@sharepoint.virtual.local">testlist@sharepoint.virtual.local</a>);
message.Subject = string.Format("Message {0}", i);
message.Body = string.Format("This is message '{0}'", i);
Console.WriteLine("Sending {0}", i);
smtp.Send(message);
}
Event Properties AfterProperties – what should they be?
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.
Andy Burns' Blog 