"Minor" Search limitations in Office 365

2013-12-122014-11-30 Andy BurnsLarge Lists, Office 365, QueryThrottling, SP2007 Search, SP2013 Development2 Comments

If you’re a SharePoint developer like me, you probably find the Query Throttle in SharePoint an absolute pain. This is a feature where, under an unnecessarily complicated set of conditions, if you try to ask for too many list items in one query, SharePoint refuses.

Now, while I understand why such a limit is necessary – albeit I’d rather it was simpler – it is something of a problem. For example, multi-choice columns cannot be indexed. If you want to query such a column, and there are more than 5000 items in the list, we’ll, you’re outta luck.

That situation is surprisingly common in Document Management systems. Continue reading “"Minor" Search limitations in Office 365” →

Content Approval and Large Lists

2013-12-112014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Approval, Large Lists, Office 365, QueryThrottling, SP2013 Administration, SP2013 Development2 Comments

So I’ve discovered an interesting problem with Content Approval, which is a special issue for Office 365. I have a document library with more than 5000 documents in it. Content Approval is turned on, and the customer would like a view of ‘Unapproved Documents’.

For a Document Management System, 5000 documents in one repository is small beer, so this is a bit of a problem. “Okay”, I thought, “this must be a choice column, so I’ll just add an index to the column”. Continue reading “Content Approval and Large Lists” →

Content Approval and Office 365 Search

2013-12-102014-11-30 Andy BurnsOffice 365, SP2007 Search, SP2013 Administration1 Comment

I have found an gotchya with Content Approval and Office 365 Search, specifically around draft item security. Embarrassingly, it did take me a while to work out that this was what was going on.

You can use content approval to allow only certain users – such as editors and approvers – the right to see draft items. However, if you do this, then the Search Crawl Account – which normally only has ‘read’ access – cannot see the draft documents to index them. Thus, draft documents that are visible to editors or approvers only never appear in the search results. Continue reading “Content Approval and Office 365 Search” →

Fail: Visual Studio 'Verify' for Office 365 in 2010 compatibility mode

2013-12-102014-11-30 Andy BurnsOffice 365, SP2013 DevelopmentLeave a comment

Right, so I’m trying to develop some Remote Event Receivers. I’ve been using our company’s tenant. Lets call it https://mytenant.sharepoint.com. That tenant was a SP2010 one, which has been upgraded.

I am trying to test using https://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/AWBTest. It’s a SP2013 site collection. Unfortunately, https://mytenant.sharepoint.com is still running in 2010 mode. Continue reading “Fail: Visual Studio 'Verify' for Office 365 in 2010 compatibility mode” →

Adding Custom Actions to SharePoint using CSOM

2013-12-012014-11-30 Andy BurnsCSOM, CustomAction, Office 365, SP2013 Development1 Comment

So I’ve been working with Office 365, and deploying site collections and their contents can be … fun. I’ve found that the best approach seems to be to use the Client-side Object Model (CSOM) – the C# API – to deploy and configure my content.

On thing I didn’t think would be easy was adding Custom Actions – but this turned out to be pretty easy, to be honest. Continue reading “Adding Custom Actions to SharePoint using CSOM” →

Office 365 Search Latency – Part 2

2013-11-292014-11-30 Andy BurnsOffice 365, SP2007 SearchLeave a comment

Following Part I, I did some more tests. It was a similar format to last time, but I though it worth looking at the results, and I also spoke to Microsoft Support about this latency question. Continue reading “Office 365 Search Latency – Part 2” →

Setting Taxonomy and URL fields in JavaScript Form Templates

2013-11-282014-11-30 Andy BurnsDisplayTemplates, JSLinks, Office 365Leave a comment

Recently, I’ve had a need to build a custom New and Edit form in an Office 365 system. Often I’d approach this with a little custom Application page to use as the form, but that isn’t available in Office 365. I had been about to start writing reams of JQuery and JavaScript until one of my colleagues introduced me to JSLinks. Continue reading “Setting Taxonomy and URL fields in JavaScript Form Templates” →

Office 365 Search Latency

2013-11-272014-11-30 Andy BurnsOffice 365, SP2007 SearchLeave a comment

I’ve had to look into Search latency in Office 365 for one of our customers. This is the time taken between a document being uploaded into Office 365 and it being available in Search. The results are interesting, though do raise a few more questions. Continue reading “Office 365 Search Latency” →

Using JSOM to query SharePoint 2013 lists with Taxonomy Fields

2013-10-292015-02-05 Andy Burnsclientobjectmodel, JavaScript, JSOM, Office 365, SP2013 Development, Taxonomy9 Comments

So, I’d an interesting problem. I have a SharePoint 2013 list that uses a Managed Metadata (or ‘Taxonomy’) field. I need to, through the JavaScript Client Object Model, get all items that have a particular value or a child of that value on the taxonomy tree. As an example, here’s my taxonomy: termSet Sounds like it should be simple to query this, right? Well, not so much. Continue reading “Using JSOM to query SharePoint 2013 lists with Taxonomy Fields” →

Looking up against Large Lists in Office 365

2013-10-242014-11-30 Andy Burnsautocomplete, JavaScript, jQuery, Large Lists, Office 365, QueryThrottleException, QueryThrottling, SP2013 Development14 Comments

So, I had an issue that I’ve a customer who wanted to have some items look up against a large list. (In fact, it was a large document library). This large list had more than 5000 items. This is a little unfortunate, due to a painful and annoying quirk in SharePoint’s design. Continue reading “Looking up against Large Lists in Office 365” →

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