SharePoint can have Wildcard searching…

2009-05-272014-11-30 Andy BurnsSP2007 Search8 Comments

One of the most popular blog post on my site is, curiously, about the lack of wildcard searching in SharePoint out of the box. This, as it happens, is a bit of a simplification, and I’d like to be a bit clearer – even if it is more complicated.

Out of the box SharePoint does not have a way of searching for “App*” and getting all results such as “Apple”, “Application”, and so on. This is the wildcard search I was on about before.
You can do a wildcard search on a particular metadata property. “Title:App*” would return items with a title that contained “Apple”, “Application”, and so on. The down side is, you have to know the property you want to search on, and you have to know its name, which isn’t always easy or viable for users.
SharePoint Search service does actually support wildcard searching – just there is no way of using it with the out of the box controls. Essenially, it’s a problem of the user interface. The search service supports 3 different ways of querying it. This is why Corey Roth wrote his wildcard search webpart (on codeplex), and I’m sure there are others. He explains why he wrote it here, and what you give up by using Full Text SQL queries.

So, in short, if you’re able to do some custom development (or use Corey’s web part), and if you’re willing to trade off some other areas of functionality, you can get wildcard searching – but it’s not just out-of-the-box.

All of this is explained in ‘Inside the Index and Search Engines: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server’ by Tisseghem and Fastrup. I highly recommend it for developers working with Search.

No Thumbnails for Custom Picture Library Definition

2009-05-212014-11-30 Andy BurnsPicture Libraries, SP2007 Development, SPPictureLibrary, Thumbnails8 Comments

I’ve got a Custom Picture Library definition – it encapsulates much of the same functionality I described a few days ago for Document Libraries. I built it, then ran Solution Generator against it to create the List definition and schema.

It all seemed to work alright, but when I tried uploading an image, it didn’t create my thumbnails, or the _w and _t folders the thumbnails are hidden in! This was a problem.

Well, I cracked open reflector (how did we do .NET development before it?) and dug around. Didn’t find much, except that the Upload.aspx page decides if it is for a Picture Library based on the List Template‘s Type attribute (ordinarily 109).

The Type attribute of a List Template tag says this:

Provides a unique identifier for the template. This identifier must be unique within the feature, but need not be unique across all feature definitions or site definitions.
…
This attribute corresponds to the Type attribute of the List element

Hmm. Interesting. I had changed my List Template‘s Type – I’ve been keeping all of mine unique in my solution, as I do have multiple lists based on the same out-of-box type (e.g. multiple lists based upon the ‘Custom List’ type). As I was suspicious, I changed this back to 109, and tried again. My thumbnails now worked.

I guess that this mean that the thumbnailing done during the upload process is contingent on the list’s Type being 109 still. As a consequence, I guess that a feature can only have one custom Picture Library definition (as “This identifier must be unique within the feature”).

Simplified People and Groups pages in SharePoint

2009-05-202014-11-30 Andy BurnsPeople and Groups, Permissions, SP2007 Admin, SP2007 Development5 Comments

One of my pet peeves with SharePoint is the People and Groups pages. These are pretty damn complicated.

You typically get groups for:

Owners
Members
Visitors

And often you can have

Approvers
Moderators
Designers
Individual users granted rights directly on the site (rather than being in a group)

… and so on. And if individual sites start to break from inheritance and define their own groups, you get even more groups. It’s possible (especially if the administrator of the system doesn’t understand what they’re doing – which is often the case) to end up with 3 times as many groups as sites!

Frankly, this is enough to confuse me, never mind users. Trips into the People and Groups pages often takes me some time to understand what I’m seeing. And the worst part is that often users just want to be able ‘Give Fred access to this site’. They don’t care about other groups or other sites, permissions levels, or any of that jazz.

The case management system we’re working on at the moment has this sort of requirement. Each case is a site, and we want ‘Case Owners‘ to be able to add/remove ‘Case Owners‘ or ‘Case Workers‘. They don’t need access to other groups. They don’t need the ability to send emails, call people, remove users from the site collection, or any of the other (confusing) options on the menus. So, I built my own administration pages… Continue reading “Simplified People and Groups pages in SharePoint” →

Show Site, List or Item information on Pages

2009-05-192014-11-30 Andy BurnsFieldValue, ListItemProperty, ListProperty, ProjectProperty, Publishing, SP2007 Development7 Comments

I’ve seen a few questions on Twitter over the last few weeks about how to show properties from Sites or Publishing pages within pages. Actually, this is very easy.

Obviously, if you’re working with Publishing Pages, you’ve got all your publishing controls, which you can see in SharePoint Designer…

But what about site information, such as the Site Title? Or other Page Information, such as the Last Modified time? Well, I want to introduce 4 other controls – ProjectProperty, ListProperty, ListItemProperty and FieldValue … Continue reading “Show Site, List or Item information on Pages” →

Get query string parameters with Regular Expressions (in JavaScript)!

2009-05-152018-02-16 Andy BurnsJavaScript, regex2 Comments

I’ve said it before, but not quite so explicitly – it’s easiest to get query string parameters with a regular expression. I keep seeing big JavaScript functions looping through and splitting the parameters up, and that might be fine if you want to store those and use them repeatedly – but if not, regexes are your friend.

This function will return the value of a parameter. If the parameter requested isn’t in the query string, it returns null.If the parameter doesn’t have a value (e.g. debug in ...&debug&...) it returns an empty string.

function GetQueryParam(parameter){ var p = escape(unescape(parameter)); var regex = new RegExp("[?&]" + p + "(?:=([^&]*))?","i"); var match = regex.exec(window.location.search); var value = null; if( match != null ){ value = match[1]; } return value; }

The Summary Toolbar in a ListView Web Part

2009-05-152014-11-30 Andy BurnsListView, ListViewWebPart, SP2007 Development3 Comments

Yesterday I was describing adding a ListView Web Part pointing at a specific view. I had a ListView Web Part which showed the right columns, but also showed the full toolbar:

…and I had a ListView which showed the Summary Toolbar, but didn’t show the right columns:

The Web Parts are defined identically, except for the BaseViewID property. So, what gives? Continue reading “The Summary Toolbar in a ListView Web Part” →

Pointing the ListViewWebPart at a particular view

2009-05-142014-11-30 Andy BurnsListView, ListViewWebPart, SP2007 Development2 Comments

So yesterday I described adding a ListViewWebPart to a Site Definition. This works – but how do you point the web part at a particular view?

This took a little figuring out. My ListViews were being defined in my ONET.xml file as:

<View List="Comments" BaseViewID="0" WebPartZoneId="Left">

Clearly the BaseViewID was a likely candidate – but what did it point to, and how could I define a view for my ListView? As is stood, My ListView kept appearing as:

Well, BaseViewID isn’t well documented, but it is actually the ID number of a view in the List Definition. I can’t say that I was able to see how to define a view for out ListView within our Site Definition itself.

If we open up our List Definition’s schema.xml file we see:

You can see that each of the views is assigned assigned a BaseViewID. I tried changing my BaseViewID to ‘1’ and my web part’s view changed to:

Great! This show’s the extra column I wanted – but it also shows the toolbar, which I didn’t. I really wanted the Summary Toolbar (the ‘Add new Item’ link, as in the top screenshot), but I’ll describe how I got that tomorrow.

Pointing ListViewWebParts at lists

2009-05-132014-11-30 Andy BurnsListView, ListViewWebPart, SP2007 Development2 Comments

I was creating a site definition recently, and I wanted to use a ListView web part in it. List View Web Parts are a little strange; unlike other web parts they’re represented by a ‘View’ element inside the ‘File’ element for a page; it’s sort of saying that we want a view onto a list shown on this page. Looking at the out-of-box site definitions, they show things like:

<View List="104" BaseViewID="0" WebPartZoneID="Left" />

Here the ‘List’ attribute is the ‘Type’ id of the List, as defined in the list definition. Great – but what if (as in my case) you have two separate lists of the same type?

Well, it turns out that it also accepts a relative URL too. As the documentation says…

List – Optional Integer or Text. Specifies the type of list. This value can be either the ID of the template for a list (an integer), or the URL to a list provisioned in the site (a string). Best practice is to use Text, because Integer might not be specific enough (e.g., if there are two announcements lists in the site and you specify List=104).

So we can use:

<View List="Comments" BaseViewID="0" WebPartZoneID="Left" WebPartOrder="1" />

Here the ‘List’ attribute is set to ‘Comments’, which is the URL to my ‘Comments’ list (no, it isn’t the name – ‘cos this list’s display name is ‘Case Comments’). And this works nicely. This is actually how some of the out-of-box site defintions work, but most of them refer to their lists by type.

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