What does TaxonomyItem.NormalizeName() do?

2014-02-012014-11-30 Andy BurnsCSOM, SP2010 Development, SP2013 Development, Taxonomy4 Comments

So, the client side application I’ve been working on has to sync a LOT of terms to the term store, and I’ve mentioned how I had problems with Managed Metadata labels and the ampersand – and how I fixed them using TaxonomyItem.NormalizeName().

Well, that was fine, but my application was slow – so I started looking at what I could do to eliminate client side object model calls (CSOM). My suspicion was that, as the function was static, it wasn’t doing anything that I couldn’t do in my application, and save a round trip to the server.

So, I opened up reflected and decompiled Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.dll. Inside I found the code for the following:

Regex _trimSpacesRegex = new Regex(@"s+", RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
//Normalize name as Taxonomy Service does
string name = _trimSpacesRegex.Replace(termName, " ").Replace('&amp;amp;', 'uff06').Replace('"', 'uff02').Trim();

That’s much, much faster than a round trip to the server, and I learnt that speechmarks are also converted from ASCII to Unicode too.

Managed Metadata Labels and the Ampersand character

2014-01-292014-11-30 Andy Burnsampersand, CSOM, SP2010 Development, SP2013 Development, Taxonomy, unicode1 Comment

I am writing an application to import/generate a number of terms in a term set. I started to get some errors about my code trying to add terms that already exist – but it does check for the existence of terms with a given name.

You can see that the string comparison for the name of the existing term and the term I want to get/create returns false, and that the terms seem to be different lengths. Well, I tried looking for blank spaces, non-printing characters, carriage returns, etc., and found nothing. Then I looked really closely at the ampersand characters shown in the debugger:

Yup, they’re different characters. You can see a slightly different shape to each of them – one is wider. Continue reading “Managed Metadata Labels and the Ampersand character” →

What happens with a large TaxonomyHiddenList?

2014-01-172014-11-30 Andy BurnsCSOM, QueryThrottling, SP2010 Development, SP2013 Development, SPFieldLookup, TaxonomyLeave a comment

SharePoint’s Taxonomy (or “Managed Metadata”) fields are a bit strange in how they work. In a lot of ways they’re actually like a lookup field, and part of this lookup field is that site collections that use them have a hidden list – called TaxonomyHiddenList – in the root of the site collection. You can find it at /lists/TaxonomyHiddenList/.

Each term that is used in a Taxonomy field has it’s label (actually, labels) and other details kind of ‘cached’ in this list, and there is a timer job that will push changes to the terms out into these lists – and therefore to items that refer to the entries in the list. Continue reading “What happens with a large TaxonomyHiddenList?” →

Tabular Search Results with Column Filters

2013-06-252014-11-30 Andy BurnsSP2007 Search, SP2010 Development, SP2010 Search, XSLLeave a comment

The customer I was with last week, like many others, wanted their search results to appear in a table form – like a List View, in fact.

Now, I’ve written the XSL to do this for various solutions over the years, but they had found a CodePlex project for this – SharePoint 2010 Search Results in Tabular Format. This project has a feature I’d not managed to write, or had seen working before – column titles that were sortable and filterable:

That’s pretty neat. And it’s all XSL. You can, if you edit the XSL and the Columns you get back from search, show, sort, and filter other columns of data.

One observation I would make is that this XSL does not format Hit Highlighting – that is, matches aren’t shown as strong, and the summary doesn’t contain any ellipsises [ … ] characters. However, you could easily add these from the ‘standard’ XSL to get hit highlighting working again.

Setting the Title field for Content Types

2013-05-092014-11-30 Andy BurnsCAML, SP2010 Development, SPContentType4 Comments

This is one I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while. I was using a Content Type where I was trying to set the display name of ‘Title’ field. I was happy to have a Title column, but I wanted it to have a different name.

I tried doing this declaratively:

<FieldRef ID="{fa564e0f-0c70-4ab9-b863-0177e6ddd247}" Name="Title" DisplayName="Request" Required="FALSE" />

However, I found this didn’t work in SP2010 – the field still appeared as ‘Title’. This was frustrating.

Instead, I had to set the Title’s display name in code:

foreach (SPFieldLink fldLnk in contentType.FieldLinks)
{
if (fldLnk.Id == SPBuiltInFieldId.Title)
{
fldLnk.DisplayName = "Request";
}
}
contentType.Update(false);

This was a bit strange – other fields can have a DisplayName set in CAML quite happily. This seems to just be a feature of the Title column.

EDIT: I also had to use a similar approach on setting the Title column for a content type used on a list – but using:

private void SetTitleField(SPWeb web, string listname, string contentTypeName, string newTitleName)
{
SPList list = web.Lists[listname];
SPContentType ct = list.ContentTypes[contentTypeName];

foreach (SPFieldLink fldLnk in ct.FieldLinks)
{
//Necessary to set title field - when using content types, this seems to set it to "Title" irrespective of what is set in the Content type or list's XML.
if (fldLnk.Id == SPBuiltInFieldId.Title)
{
	fldLnk.DisplayName = newTitleName;
	ct.Update(false);
	break;
}
}
foreach (SPField fld in list.Fields)
{
if (fld.Id == SPBuiltInFieldId.Title)
{
	fld.Title = newTitleName;
	fld.Update();
	break;
}
}
}

BeforeProperties and AfterProperties

2012-11-212014-11-30 Andy BurnsEvent Receivers, SP2007 Development, SP2010 Development, SPItemEventReceiverLeave a comment

I am sick of having to hunt down the link to Synergy’s post on the BeforeProperties and AfterProperties available in different events on SPListItems. For my reference, here it is:

List:

List	BeforeProperties	AfterProperties	properties.ListItem
ItemAdding	No value	New value	Null
ItemAdded	No value	New value	New value
ItemUpdating	No value	Changed value	Original value
ItemUpdated	No value	Changed value	Changed value
ItemDeleting	No value	No value	Original value
ItemDeleted	No value	No value	Null

Document Library:

Library	BeforeProperties	AfterProperties	properties.ListItem
ItemAdding	No value	No value	Null
ItemAdded	No value	No value	New value
ItemUpdating	Original value	Changed value	Original value
ItemUpdated	Original value	Changed value	Changed value
ItemDeleting	No value	No value	Original value
ItemDeleted	No value	No value	Null

Note: Allegedly, this does change if the event receiver is synchronous – the before properties are available. I’ve not checked this out yet.

Obviously, for SharePoint 2007 systems that doesn’t apply – as ‘*ed’ event receivers are always asynchronous.

ContentIterator – Curious Behaviour, and Infinite looping

2012-11-012014-11-30 Andy BurnsContentIterator, SP2010 DevelopmentLeave a comment

I like the ContentIterator control – it’s a nice way of being able to process a lot of items in SharePoint. However, sometimes it’s behaviour is … strange.

I had been using it to loop over some (but not all) the items in a list. Some changes meant that I was now going to loop over all the items. I had a list with 500 items that I was testing with. My code was:

ContentIterator ci = new ContentIterator("example");
SPQuery qry = new SPQuery();
qry.Query = ContentIterator.ItemEnumerationOrderByNVPField;
ci.ProcessListItems(list,qry, ProcessItem, ProcessItemError);

This would process the first 200 items, over and over. It never reached an end. Hmm. Continue reading “ContentIterator – Curious Behaviour, and Infinite looping” →

Delete Event Receiver from a Content Type with Code

2012-10-102014-11-30 Andy BurnsContent Type, Event Receivers, SP2010 Development, SPContentType, SPItemEventReceiverLeave a comment

SharePoint allows you to attach event receivers to content types. That’s pretty handy. Unfortunately, deleting event receivers from those content types is much more hard. Perhaps this is why the Document ID feature fails to remove the content types that it adds. However, here is one possible approach.

SPContentType ctype = site.RootWeb.ContentTypes[SPBuiltInContentTypeId.Document];
if (ctype != null)
{
 if (ctype.EventReceivers != null)
 {
   bool bContinueDelete = true;
   while (bContinueDelete)
   {
     if (ctype.EventReceivers.Count < 1)
     {
       bContinueDelete = false;
     }
     else
     {
     bool bFoundOne = false;
     foreach (SPEventReceiverDefinition d in ctype.EventReceivers)
     {
         //Could match on the Type of the event receiver, but for this example, let's use name
         if (d.Name.Contains("Document ID"))
         {
           d.Delete();
           ctype.Update(true, false);
           bFoundOne = true;
           break;
         }
     }
     if (!bFoundOne)
     {
       bContinueDelete = false;
     }
   }
 }
}

More on why this is important in a later post.

Deploy a solution to the sandbox in C#

2012-08-152014-11-30 Andy BurnsSP2010 Development, SPSolutionLeave a comment

I came across a question on StackOverflow about how to programmatically deploy a sandbox solution, and this seemed a good question. Here’s what I came up with…

Continue reading “Deploy a solution to the sandbox in C#” →

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