Programmatically create and configure Mail Enabled lists

2009-04-152014-11-30 Andy BurnsEmail, SP2007 Development, SPList5 Comments

Being able to mail enable a sharepoint list is pretty cool; once enabled an email can receive email, save attachments, etc.. But what’s the address of the lists? How do you enable it? How are attachments stored, and how do we decide who to let email it?

Well, for a customer we wanted to email enable a list with an address based on the site’s title. This meant that the site would have to be created before we could enable the list. So, I stapled a feature to the site’s definition, and used a feature receiver to run my code. Continue reading “Programmatically create and configure Mail Enabled lists” →

Roll up content by content-type

2009-04-072014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Rollup, Content Type, SP2007 Development, Web PartsLeave a comment

Pointed out to me by a colleague (ages ago!) – Ton Stegeman’s ‘Content by Type‘ web part. A good way of rolling up content of diverse types, without lots of XSL. If your content type structure is right, may well be other ways of doing this (the content query web part and data view may work) – but this is quite a nice looking tool, and simpler. Need to download and have a play sometime soon.

Programmatically create pages – and Add Web Parts

2009-04-022014-11-30 Andy BurnsContextual Search, Page Layouts, Publishing, PublishingWeb, SP2007 Development, SP2007 Search5 Comments

I had an interesting problem recently with a Site Definition. I was trying to create a publishing page, which would not create as the correct content type. I still haven’t got to the bottom of why.

However, time was limited, and we were going to have to create a feature receiver to staple to our site definition anyway, so I had a look at creating a publishing page programmatically.

We needed a feature receiver as the customer wanted the home page of their site to have a ‘Search Box’ which would ‘Search this site’, but go to a custom results page in a Search Center. My plan was to use a Search Box Web part, configured to go to a custom results page, and to append the query term:

site: [url to site]

e.g. site:http://sharepoint/finance/

Naturally, you don’t know the URL of the site until the site has been created – so this web part would have to be created programmatically. Continue reading “Programmatically create pages – and Add Web Parts” →

Polling Web Part by Phil Wicklund

2009-03-302014-11-30 Andy BurnsPolls, SP2007 Development, Web Parts3 Comments

I’ve just downloaded (from codeplex) and had a look at the Polling Web Part by Phil Wicklund. We’ve a customer who wants exactly this sort of functionality – surveys are too heavy weight; they just want a little radio-button panel. That’s what the Polling Web Part does:

Cool. And it shows it’s results as:

Hmm. So how does it store it’s data? Well, that seems to me a little strange – each poll, options and responses are a single row in a list:

Bit strange if you ask me. Some consequences of this are that:

You can’t have more than 5 options
You can’t be sure that someone doesn’t respond twice (although it appears that a cookie is set to prevent that from being too easy).
Curiously, you can’t tell the web part to point to a particular poll question. It appears to always point to the latest. It’d be nice to have a drop down to select the poll in the Web Part Toolbox menu.

I must confess that I’d have considered having different polls in different lists, and reading the values available out of a Choice column on that list. Each response would be a List Item, so you’d know if someone has already created one. Still, Phil’s approach is probably quicker to process.

Other thoughts – well, it’d be nice to have bar chart rendering too.

All of which is, I must point out, quite picky. It does what it does well, and is free, and the source code is available; I may try and have a look at that at some time.

Date Formats in SharePoint again

2009-03-262014-11-30 Andy BurnsCQWP, Dates, SP2007 Development

So, I was playing with Date formats again in SharePoint, and came across a good tip from Panvega worth a shout – Using ddwrt:FormatDate in the CQWP. I needed to take the Publishing date for a page and reformat it (I don’t need ’14:55:47 GMT’ on the end); this allowed me to do that!

Linking list data and summing over it with XSL and the Dataview Web Part

2009-03-252014-11-30 Andy BurnsDataview, SP2007 Development, XSL15 Comments

Thrilling title, eh? So, previously I’ve talked about merged lists in the Dataview web part. This time, I was after something slightly different – rather than merging two lists, I wanted to join them.

Joining is pretty easy, actually, but the process is a little bizarre. I ended up using the post ‘Performing Joins with SharePoint Lists‘ by Sahil Malik. The thing that confused me was that when I was I expected to provide the ‘keys’ of my lists when I created the new Datasource – but actually, you define it when you insert your ‘joined subview’.

Anyway, the scenario was that there are customer purchases for ‘Credits’ to do things. Operatives then do things for them, and these actions subtract time off those pools of credits. The need was for a way to:

Record purchases of pools of credits. Customers may purchase multiple times, but under different agreements (or invoices, or whatever)
Record actions and the number of credits that they cost
Remaining total.

I solved this with a Dataview web part, and two lists. Continue reading “Linking list data and summing over it with XSL and the Dataview Web Part” →

Deploy Publishing Pages and Content Types as a feature

2009-03-132014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Type, Features, Page Layouts, SP2007 Branding, SP2007 Development3 Comments

Aka “CAML is the bastard spawn of Satan”.

So, I’m writing a site definition to create a Publishing site. This is a bit of a first for me. One of the things I want to do is deploy a new Publishing Page Content type, and associate some layouts with it.

I started by following Andrew Connell’s instructions for a Minimal Site Definition (as in his book). This all seemed to go pretty well; testing created a new, minimal site.

Next up I wanted to deploy the Content Type and associated page layouts. Well, there wasn’t much information in his book on this – like him, I’d figured I’d write a separate Feature for deploying just the content type and page layouts – but there was very little information in his book about this. Continue reading “Deploy Publishing Pages and Content Types as a feature” →

Show a Page's Contact and Picture on a Publishing Page

2009-03-122014-11-30 Andy BurnsContactFieldControl, Page Layouts, Publishing, SP2007 Development3 Comments

So, one of our customers is really keen that the new Page Layouts I’m writing show the page’s contact on the page. For those of you who perhaps haven’t had need to use this, the Contact field is a standard field on Publishing Pages (i.e. the Page content type). You can interact with it via the page settings:

… which shows a page with…

These fields are to allow you to select another SharePoint user, or manually enter someone’s details (if they’re not a SharePoint user!) Further, these fields are available in SharePoint designer:

So this looks like it’s shaping up to be a very brief blog post. Open up SharePoint designer, edit the page layout, drag the Contact field onto the page. With that, we get:

Great! Well, no, there are two problems with that…

Continue reading “Show a Page's Contact and Picture on a Publishing Page” →

Missing Web Part Titles in Search Center Pages

2009-03-112014-11-30 Andy BurnsSharePoint Designer, SP2007 Development, Web Parts2 Comments

I just had a really weird error – I’d built some search pages for a customer. There was a custom results page, and a custom ‘Advanced Search’ page. When I went into Edit mode, to change the web parts, they didn’t have a title bar – including the ‘Modify this web part’ link. WTF?

Well, they’d been customized using SharePoint Designer, so I figured I’d copy their code from the customer system into a VM of mine, and check that the pages broke on my system. They didn’t. WTF x2 ?

So, the page page code, inside the same master page, in two different systems works differently. To check I wasn’t going nuts, I tried a WinMerge compare on the two files – and found this chunk of XML in my non-working version on the customer site:

Yes, although I’d cut and pasted the code, it was different. I came to the conclusion that this code is created or used by SharePoint Designer itself. I decided to delete it, save the changes to the customer’s page, and refresh my pages. It worked; now when I edit the page, lo, there are titles and the ‘Modify this web part’ menu. I have no idea what this XML is about, but I’m about 70% confident that it’s the culprit. I reckon that there’s a 30% chance that it was just being customized in SharePoint Designer again that fixed it, but I couldn’t see anything else related to the code that was likely to be a problem.

CQWP: Show the first item in each group

2009-03-102014-11-30 Andy BurnsCQWP, SP2007 Development, XSL8 Comments

So, we have a customer who has a library of Newsletters.

These newsletters belong to different regions, and they have a date on which they should be ‘published’ – or at least, a date at which they’re the most recent item. So, we have two columns to capture that – News Region and Publish Date.

The customer wanted a web part on a page that would show the most recently ‘published’ item for each of those regions. Something like:

I did this with the Content Query Web Part (CQWP) – but how?

Well, first I set my CQWP to query the list of newsletters. They have a specific content type that I queried for. I filtered items with a Publish Date in the future out – although not a secure way of preventing users seeing these items, at least it doesn’t make the obvious.

Next, I set the CQWP to group by News Region, and Sort by descenting Publish Date. So far, so standard – but it would also return multiple items for each region, and display their title, not their region.

This called for a special Itemstyle, which I added using the technique mentioned before for putting ItemStyles into a different file. This made sense; we’re not going to use this style extensively, so it’s best to keep it separate.

Next, I modified my CommonViewFields to bring in the News Region column. I’ve mentioned this before.

Then I wrote my XSL:

Take a look at it – it’s cool.

Looking at the code, you can see I read the News Region that we’re looking at into a variable. I then count up the number of preceding nodes which also have the same value for their News Region.

The first node with a particular News Region value will always be the one with the latest Publish Date that isn’t in the future – therefore, the most recent one for that region. The count statement won’t count nodes for other regions, either. So, if it’s the first, we display it – using the News Region text, rather than the title. Simple!

(But a bugger of an XSL query to figure out)

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