Raymond Little

How to access the webpart maintenance page

Raymond Little — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:59:04 GMT

When making some changes to a client's SharePoint 2003 site I came across a page that had a content editor webpart, which had a JavaScript re-direct in it. This caused me all sorts of problems as I wanted to stop the re-direct as the client now wanted to use this page instead of taking the users else where. I knew that I could use the webpart maintenance page but for the life of me I couldn't remember how to access. After some investigation I found out that if you type in the URL of the page and add in ?contents=1 then this takes you to the maintenance page and from there I was able to close my problematic webpart.

This works on both SharePoint 2003 and MOSS 2007 so from now on if you need to get access to the webpart maintenance page you can use this technique

Problems serializing a generic list using SoapFormatter

Raymond Little — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:22:43 GMT

Just recently I have been studying for my MCTS foundation exam and as part of this I had created a windows for application for calculating golf scores. As part of this application I was storing the information in a generic list of a custom Person class. I decided to extend the functionality by allowing the user to export and import the information and thought it would be an ideally opportunity to practice serialization.

At first I was using a binary formatter and everything worked fine, however I decided to try using the SoapFormatter instead. I changed the code to use SoapFormatter and expected everything would just work as I had test it using the binary formatter but when I ran the program I got an error saying

"Soap Serializer does not support serializing Generic Types : System.Collections.Generic.List`1[GolfScores.Person]."

After spending some time researching the problem I found an interesting discussion on the MSDN forum about this error, http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/netfxremoting/thread/ee4a7a63-290e-432f-bd45-44f4cb7a3467/.

Apparently there are ways around this but for the purposes of my golf application I was able to use the XmlSerializer. Most people use generics these days so its something to consider when you are looking to use the to serialize information stored in a generic list.

Restoring a site tree in ADAM

Raymond Little — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:34:57 GMT

Recently one of our clients wanted to update their staging environment with the content from live so they could test with up to real content. Having done this before I thought this would be an easy job, however I found a slight issue with the restore process.

When performing the back up one of the parameters allows you to specify if you are exporting from AD/AM. What the documentation doesn't tell you is you also have to specify this when you are trying to restore the back up. If you don't include this you get an extremely unhelpful 'Index out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection' error.

I spent a good while checking the command, checking the XML that was generated, changing the parameters to try and identify what section was causing the problem until I double checked the command line help and spotted the /ADAM parameter. Initially I didn't think this would be the issue as I assumed that there would be a more helpful error message if you missed out the switch but no as soon as I added this everything worked fine.

Hopefully this will save you some time if you encounter this problem.

Adding Custom Properties to Search Results in MOSS 2007

Raymond Little — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:02:47 GMT

A common request is to create custom user profile properties to store information about users, this is something I will covered in my previous post. This is helpful when viewing their profile but if this is an important piece of information then it is possible you may need to include this in the search results for the people search and this is what I shall be covering today. In this example my property is called 'TestProperty', see below.

Next I have populated my user profile to contain some test information for this property, see below

Next you have to set up a new 'Managed Property' that relates to our new user profile property. To do this navigate to your shared service provider then select 'Search Settings'. Once in the search settings section click 'Metadata property mappings' this will then give you a list of all the existing properties. To create a new managed property click 'New Managed Property' in the toolbar. Enter the name, description, select the type of information it has to hold, this should match what you selected for the user property. The most important section on this page is the mapping property as this decides what crawled property your managed property is associated with. In this case I am mapping my new managed property to my user profile property, see below.

Once you have set up the new Managed Property you need to perform a full crawl to make sure the test data entered is picked up by the search results. Once the full crawl is finished you can check that the new property has information in it by clicking on 'Managed Properties' and then clicking on your newly created managed property and you should see in the 'Content using this property' section it will have the number of items using this property, see below.

Now we have the property with the data the next step is to adjust the search results to pull out the new property. In this example I will edit the people search core results web part but the same principle applies to any of the search web parts. First navigate to the people search results page and open the people search core results webpart editor. Second, expand the 'Results Query Option' and click in the 'selected columns' textbox. Once you have done this a button with three dots will appear on the right hand side of the textbox if you click on that it will open an editor with a list of all the columns that are available to be used to display information in the webpart, I find it easier to copy the content and paste it into visual studio but similarly you can used notepad or even edit it in the editor. Where ever you choose to edit the columns you need to copy one of the existing columns and replace the name with your own name, for some reason I could only get this to work if the name is ALL in capitals, see below.

The final step is to edit the XSL that is used to render the generated XML. To do this click on 'XSL Editor' under the 'Data View Properties' section. You can place the information anywhere you want but for this example I shall add it next to the other office profile information. The first step is to add the new property as a parameter to the 'DisplayOfficeProfile' again the name of the property must be capitalised for this to work, see below.

The final step is to change the 'DisplayOfficeProfile' template to include this new parameter and display the information. The screenshot below shows what the new template looks like.

If you now save the editor, save and close the web then publish the page if you perform another search you should see the information appear in the webpart. One thing i have noticed is sometimes when you make a change to the webpart and click 'OK' it will look like the webpart is throwing an error. I'm not sure why this is but if you publish the page and perform another search it works ok.

Hope this help.

Setting up Site usage summary reports in MOSS 2007

Raymond Little — Wed, 28 May 2008 11:26:27 GMT

Setting up the built in usage reports is an important step when configuring your web farm but it is something that can be easily missed. There are two different sets of reports you can use to anaylse the usage of your farm they are:

Site Usage Reports - These reports are used to analyse an individual site.
Site Collection Usage Summary - These reports are used to analyse the site collection as a whole.

Both of these contain some similar statics on Requests, Users, Referrers, Destination Pages and Home Page that can be used to provide an insight into how both individual sites and the site collection is being access. The Site Collection Usage Summary also has some reports showing Search queries and Search results that again can help helpful in configuring your search settings to make it as easy as possible for user to find the information they are looking for.

You can check if these reports are enabled by navigating to site settings and clicking on either one of the links. If the page looks like the example below then you still need to configure the farm.

To enable these reports there are two settings in central admin which you have to enable they are:

Usage Analysis Processing
Usage Reporting

To enable Usage Analysis Processing navigate to the 'Operations' tab, next click on 'Usage analysis processing' located under 'Logging and Reporting', see below.

Next check both 'Enable Logging' and 'Enable usage analysis processing'. At this point you have two important considerations first which location you want to store your log files and second what time you want to run the processing at., see example below.

Considering the log locations first it is generally accepted that as most MOSS 2007 log files can grow to significant sizes you should move them to another drive. I would follow this best practice and set the location to another drive which has additional space available. The next consideration is the time you want to run the processing at and again best practice dictates that these type of tasks should be done when the site is not being used. So with this in mind I usually set the time to the early hours of the morning. Once you are happy with these setting we need to move on to configuring the Usage reporting.

You can find the Usage reporting in the setting for your Shared Service Provider under 'Office SharePoint Usage Reporting'.

To enable this all you have to do is check both 'Enable advanced usage analysis processing' and ' Enable search query logging'.

If you now navigate to either the Site usage summary or the Site collection usage summary you should see it now displays the reports. When you first view the reports most likely they will be blank, as below, this is because it only starts capturing the data once we have enabled the usage logging and we also have to wait until the analysis processing has been completed.

If you check the after the processing has been done you should see the reports will now contain data.

Threaded View for Discussion Boards in MOSS 2007

Raymond Little — Tue, 13 May 2008 08:41:17 GMT

Does anyone know if there is a way in MOSS 2007 to create a threaded view similar to the 2003 version with '+' and '-' to expand and collapse Discussions, see image below for example?

How to programatically generate list of document libraries in MOSS 2007

Raymond Little — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:26:07 GMT

During one of our recent projects we had a site, which contained multiple sites each several document libraries some of which were based on a custom list definition. During testing we noticed that all the document libraries based on our definition had 'Allow management of content types' set to no, which was a problem as we had create several content types that were to be used across the site. After some discussion we decided that there were two options:

Manually set each document library.
Write a custom application to do it for us.

Given the size of the site and the time involved in setting each document library we decided that the best approach was to write a custom application to do this for us and this is what I shall be looking at today.

My application was designed to only be used by my self or other developers and was for a very specific purpose, therefore was fairly basic but you could extract some of the settings from the actual code and create a generic application that could be tailored to extract a collection of any type of list or library across a site collection.

The first problem I encountered was that while trying to run the application i didn't have appropriate permission so in order to get around this I used the RunWithElevatedPrivileges method to prevent this. The important part of this section is you must open the web before running the code with elevated permissions otherwise you will still encounter problems.

Now that we have the correct permission to access the site via the API I could then connect to the chosen site, specified via a textbox on the application, and iterate through the sites to find the selection of document libraries that match my criteria. The first step in achieving this is to open the SPWeb object again this time with the higher level of permissions and make sure there are webs within the site collection. Next I iterated through the list of SPWebs in the collection and then for each SPWeb called a separated method that looked at all the lists within that site.

The IterateThroughLists method is the one that performs the check to see if any of the document libraries in the given site matches the criteria I’m looking for and if it does set 'Allow management of content types' set to true. The first step is to get the collection of lists within the site and then iterate through the lists. Next I examine each item in the list collection and compare them against my criteria. In this example I am looking for document libraries based on my custom definition so I know that the base type must be 'Document Library' and I also know that the document libraries I’m looking for have certain TemplateFeatureId so I can match this against a specific GUID, set as a constant. Finally I check to see if the document library already has 'Allow management of content types' set to true if it does then i can ignore it otherwise set it to true.

One key thing that cause me some problems was not calling the Update method as without this the code makes the changes but does not save them. So even though you can debug through the code and watch it set 'Allow management of content types' to true if you don't call the update method when you then look at the document library it will still say 'Allow management of content types' is set to no . I hope you found this useful and can see how easily it can be changed to look across sites and generate collections of lists given certain criteria.

UPgrading SharePoint 2003 to MOSS 2007 via Database Migration Method

Raymond Little — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:13:44 GMT

I have recently been involved in upgrading an old SharePoint 2003 intranet, with minimum customization, to MOSS 2007. At first on reading the documentation this seemed like a relatively easy process. According to the documentation the basic steps are:

Install MOSS on the new server.
Create a new website in IIS on the new server.
Copy over all customizations, in my case none.
Configure the new farm i.e mail settings, services on the servers in the farm.
Run prescan.exe on the SharePoint 2003 content database.
Mark the existing content db as read only to prevent additional content being added.
Backup the database and restore it onto the new database server.
Create a new web application; pointing it to the new website created in step 1 and change the database name to the one you restored.
Click OK.

According to the instructions it will now go away and upgrade the old content database to MOSS 2007. Unfortunately after following all the steps I encountered 88 errors during the upgrade process. The error message I received was complaining about a webpart on peoples my sites but after much searching the internet I found only one article with the same problem, however they had not come up with a solution either. Thankfully my sites were not used very often and the content was often out dated. As a result I was able to get around this by deleting all my sites from the content database. Obviously this is not an idea solution as in most cases if you are performing an upgrade then people may want to take content across from their my site so if anyone has encountered this problem before and knows a better solution then please leave a comment.

To get the upgrade working I not only had to delete all my sites from the web table in the database but also remove all references from other tables as well. This was a bit tricky as the WebId is referenced in multiple tables so i checked each table and if there was a reference to WebId I ran an SQL script to delete all entries from that table which were in the web table and are a my site, see script below.

Delete
FROM         WebMembers
WHERE     (WebId IN
                          (SELECT     Id
                            FROM          Webs
                            WHERE      (FullUrl LIKE 'personal/%')))

After doing this I re-tried the upgrade and everything went ok. Again this could potentially be an issue if you want to keep the my sites from the SharePoint 2003 site. As mentioned earlier if you know another way around this then please let me know.

Some other site I found useful for upgrade were:

http://alancoulter.blogspot.com/2007/05/ms-advantages-sps-to-moss-2007-upgrade.html

http://joeloleson.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!B05AD15E2DE730DD!364.entry

http://geekswithblogs.net/RogueCoder/archive/2007/05/08/112343.aspx

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/johnwpowell/archive/2007/07/12/migrating-sharepoint-portal-2003-database-to-sharepoint-2007-using-content-database-migration.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263299.aspx

Creating Item Templates in Visual Studio 2005

Raymond Little — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:40:56 GMT

Following on from my previous article Create Custom Visual Studio 2005 Website Project Template we decided that in addition to creating a template for all future website projects it would be a good idea to have templates for aspx pages and user controls that could be used in our website projects. In this article i will document the steps required for create a custom aspx page template but the same princples can be used for creating vaious item templates.

Create your aspx page as normal in Visual Studio 2005
Create a folder and place the aspx, aspx.cs and an xml document call with the extention of .vstemplate
In the .vstempalate file add the following

<VSTemplate Type="Item" Version="2.0.0"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/vstemplate/2005">
    <TemplateData>
        <Name>BasePage</Name>
        <Description>Base Page.</Description>
        <Icon>Icon.ico</Icon>
        <ProjectType>Web</ProjectType>
        <ProjectSubType>CSharp</ProjectSubType>
    </TemplateData>
    <TemplateContent>
        <ProjectItem ReplaceParameters="true" TargetFileName="$fileinputname$.aspx">BasePage.aspx</ProjectItem>
        <ProjectItem ReplaceParameters="true" TargetFileName="$fileinputname$.aspx.cs">BasePage.aspx.cs</ProjectItem>
        <CustomParameters>
            <CustomParameter Name="$classname$" Value="$fileinputname$"/>
        </CustomParameters>
    </TemplateContent>
</VSTemplate>

This is the basic information you must supply in order to get your item template up and running. The first section describes the name and type of the item template so in this example I’m creating a custom aspx page for use in website projects. The main area that caused me some issues was setting the ProjectType and ProjectSubType correctly. I couldn't find any documentation on the actual combination required to get the template to appear under the 'My Templates' but this combinations works, for item templates in website projects, so hopefully it will save you some time.

The next section lists all the files needed as part of this item template, which in this case are the aspx page and the code behind file. The key points here are the ReplaceParameters and TargetFileName options. The TargetFileName creates the page based on the one you've supplied but changes the name to whatever is supplied by the user. The other attribute I’m setting is ReplaceParameters and this looks in the file specified, in this case BasePage.aspx for anything with the format $parameter$ and replaces it with the supplied value. In my example in the aspx page we are using this to set the codebehind file, see below.
<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="$fileinputname$.aspx.cs" Inherits="$fileinputname$" %>
The final step is to zip up the files in my case BasePage.aspx, BasePage.aspx.cs and BasePage.vstemplate and copy them to C:\Documents and Settings\YOURNAME\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ItemTemplates\Visual Web Developer.

You should now be able to create items that are based on your item template. One thing to remember is because I’ve set my ProjectType to be web I can only create templates in a website.

Forgotten Password User Control on AdxStudio version 5.3 based on AD/AM

Raymond Little — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 04:45:36 GMT

I mentioned in another post some of the issues with solutions built using AdxStudio version 5.3 when based on AD/AM instead of active directory, one of which was the forgotten password control not working. Apparently this has been fixed in version 6 but this wasn't much help to me as the client didn't want to upgrade at the moment thus I was forced to come up with an alternative solution and this article covers the steps involved. My aspx page contains a textbox for the username and a button for the user to submit to receive a new password. Then in the code behind in my OnClick method I search AD/AM for the user, generate a random password, set the password, and email the user.

Obviously if I’m going to change the user's password I first need to find the Directory Entry for that user in AD/AM. There are lots of articles on how to do this one I found very helpful was www.codeproject.com/KB/system/everythingInAD.aspx. In the example below I am creating an instance of a Directory Entry passing in the user whom I am about to change the password off, username and password details that will be used to connect to AD/AM

            string strUser = username
           string strPwd = password
            DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry(userDN, strUser, strPwd);

Next I generated a random password for the user and again there are lots of articles for this so I won't go into it here. This next section is the area that caused me some problems.

            string strPassword = your new password
            entry.RefreshCache();

            int intPortNumber = port number of the AD/AM instance

            entry.Invoke("SetOption",
            new object[] { 6, intPortNumber });

             entry.Invoke("SetOption",
             new object[] { 7, 1 });

             entry.Invoke("SetPassword",
             new object[] { strPassword });

             entry.CommitChanges();

Now I have changed the password of my user all I have to do is let them that it has been changed and then email them with the new password. Again this is straight forward enough and there are plenty of articles on how to do this. I have added a few links that helped me below:

en.csharp-online.net/User_Management_with_Active_Directory
msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dx0d151f(VS.71).aspx
blackfalconsoftware.wordpress.com/2007/04/24/tools-code-working-with-active-directory-in-c/