So, we’ve a customer who wanted a cheap and cheerful Polling web part. I’d seen one before on Codeplex by Phil Wicklund, and more recently I’d noticed the SPUserPoll by Edwin Vriethoff web part also on Codeplex. (I might try to review it at some point soon).
Both these web parts look kind of similar. They should do – they use the same control to display the charts – the ASP Chart control in System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting library. Continue reading “ASP Charting Settings for SharePoint”
Recently I wrote a web part using the WSPBuilder Visual Studio add-ins. I wanted to deploy it to the BIN directory and not have to elevate the trust level of my farm, so I was going to have to write a Code Access Security Policy (CAS Policy).
Others have written good descriptions of what CAS Policy is (here is a good description by Bamboo), but the short description is that it tells your application (SharePoint) to give certain additional rights to an assembly (in our case, the web part). These rights are things like being able to access the disc, the network, or even the SharePoint Object Model!
Yup, that’s right – under default Code Access Security, my assembly wouldn’t even be able to access the SharePoint APIs. Continue reading “WSPBuilder and CAS Policies”
I love Twitter – you get some though provoking questions on it. Thomas Resing asked the other day:
How are you applying styles to your custom web parts in #SharePoint? using CSSClass property, stuck on deploying css <Link> tag in the head
Well, for pages themselves you have the CSSRegistration control. It’s an ASP.NET control, and looks something like:
<SharePoint:CssRegistration name="/_layouts/myBrand/SomeStyle.css" runat="server"/>
This control registers the URL with the page, but doesn’t emit anything. That’s controlled by the CssLink control:
<Sharepoint:CssLink runat="server" />
It actually outputs the <link> elements, and this means that you can have a CSSRegistration control low down in the page (in a Content control, for example) and you can still output it in the <head> of your page. There’s a good post about this on CleverWorkarounds.
So, could we use that control? Well, we should be able to instantiate one – except it turns out that we don’t have to. We can just use the CSSRegistration.Register() static method – something like:
protected override void CreateChildControls(){
CssRegistration.Register("/_layouts/myBrand/SomeStyle.css");
}
Job done…
Tobias Zimmergren tweeted today asking
Anyone got recommendations to how you modify RSS-Settings for an SPList object using the API?
Good question. The SPList object does have a property EnableSyndication that gets or sets whether an RSS feed is available. There is also an property ‘AllowRssFeeds’, but it is, apparently, read only.
So, you can set whether one is allowed or not – but there are a lot more settings. What about controlling them programmatically? Continue reading “Control the RSS Feed Settings on an SPList via the API”
The Holy Grail of SharePoint branding – at least as far as I’m concerned – is rounded corners on Web Parts. Every design that comes in has this at first. As mentioned yesterday there are examples of doing this for the web part’s title – I’ve done this using Madalina’s instructions and Heather Solomon has some instructions too.
However, as far as I know nobody has yet figured out a way of putting rounded corners on the bottom corners of web parts. The HTML they have does not suit them to do this via CSS. The only idea I’ve had previously was to use ControlAdapters to modify the output of of the Web Part itself. And I’m pretty sure you’d have to write an adapter per web parts. That kind of sucks; no customer is going to be in a hurry to pay for that.
Well, when I was looking at putting borders around an entire web part zone, I had a thought. What we really need to do is insert elements into our page. jQuery can do that sort of thing. Could I use jQuery to find each web part and wrap some tags around it? Continue reading “Rounded Corners on Web Parts”
Just read an interesting article from Waldek Mastykarz called ‘Performance of various methods to retrieve one list item’. It’s well worth a look – go and read it.
So, the interesting thing I took away from it was just how slow the GetItemById() method was compared to an SPQuery. Why? Wouldn’t it make sense to use and SPQuery within the GetItemById() method?
Well a bit of Reflector digging (again) shows that it does! But it isn’t just a query for the item with that Id – it also specifies that the
SPQuery.ViewAttributes = "Scope="RecursiveAll" ModerationType="Moderator" ";
Hmm. So it’s probably a more complicated query. Depending on your solution, you might not need “RecursiveAll” – I try to avoid folders in lists, preferring views to break down my content.
So, the lesson that I took away was that if you are doing a LOT of getting items from lists, it is worth considering how you want to. There isn’t a right answer, unfortunately, and testing is key. The problem is, there are many factors:
It’s difficult to know, hence I think Waldek is right – give it a test so you have some idea!
Ages ago I observed that the ‘Add New Document’ link in a summary toolbar takes you to an ‘Upload’ page, rather than creating a new document based on that template, and suggested doing something about that. That was a bit of a hack, though, so now I’ve written a web part to allow you to display ‘Add new…’ links and if you click on them, it opens up a new document based on that content type’s template. I’ve called it the ‘Create New Document Web Part’
SharePoint List items all have a Title column (although it’s display name might be changed to something else). This Title column is a string, which is unfortunate as sometimes you really don’t need a string column on a list; this was the need I faced.
You can make a Title column not required:
Also, if you go to the ‘Advanced Settings’ page of your list and ‘Allow management of Content Types’ you can then go into your content types and Hide the Title column. This is okay – but the Title column is still there – it’s just being displayed with “(no title)”… Continue reading “Using jQuery to fix the removal of the Title column of a list”
I needed to query an SPList by a User column. I wanted to query the list by account (DOMAINUser) and check that that user existed. Essentially, I’m validating the input of a PeopleEditor control against users in the SPList. Unfortunately, this didn’t look possible – examining my list items through the object model I seemed to get back a value like a lookup field – that is [number;#value]. For example:
1#;John Smith
Not very useful – accounts are unique, but John Smith’s aren’t. I was beginning to feel a bit frantic about not being able to do this sort of query when I found this very useful post by Karthikeyan Kasiviswanathan. The short of it – you have to set the column up to display the account if you want to query by the account.
Sort of makes sense – but is a bit weird too. I mean, isn’t the account the unique bit? Shouldn’t I always be able to query by that? Still, this should work for me.
Curious problem this – I had a web part zone where all web parts being put in it would be displayed without their titles. Didn’t matter if you manually went and turned on the chrome to show a title – that setting never saved, and the web parts didn’t ever have a title.
After tracking through all the page’s code, I found that when I set the WebPartZone’s ID to be ‘Main’ then my web parts ceased functioning correctly; their titles disappeared. If I set the ID back to ‘Left’, then all was fine.
I don’t know why this happens, but certainly using a different ID for my zone fixes it. If anyone knows why this actually happens, please let me know.
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