SharePoint navigation - Make current item highlighting work

Yesterday, one of my clients asked me to add list pages in teh global navigation and I am sure everyone who uses MOSS will be familier with a well known isuse of its navigation that it does not highlight list pages and pages which are in libraries other than Pages library and at root.

So now I have left with one option which was to create my own one but wait a minute, SharePoint Menu control which is inherited from ASP.Net menu control is a sealed one so no luck. Then I decided to do a little bit google and found this cool article with source code as well.

Try this one and enjoy :)
http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/itaysk/archive/2007/09/18/sharepoint-navigation-make-current-item-highlighting-work.aspx

How to delete My Site of a user within SharePoint

To delete my site of a particular user, run following command

stsadm -o deletesite -url http://spswebname/personal/username.

You can fine stsadm command at $:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\bin and don’t forget to replace spswebname with actual web name, and username with the name (loginname) of that user. For this, login as SharePoint administrator.

Problems with Infopath forms over Internet & ISA Servers

Yesterday, one of my client sent me a request that they published our workflow solution built over InfoPath 2007 Form services and WWF over internet and suddenly discovered that users could not access or submit the form using FQDN.

Their users were accessing SharePoint sites and InfoPath form in one of following different ways:

Via the Intranet: http://intranet
Via the Extranet: http://extranet.ourcompany.com
Via the ISA Server: https://interet.ourcompany.com
The form is set to full trust, published from InfoPath as a site content type and deployed as Administrator-approval required form (browser compatible) and then activated through Central Administration. It was activated at http://intranet.

At that time, I enabled SharePoint logging and started drilling into log files where I came to know that for some odd reason InfoPath form was submitting the data to the internal URL which was http://intranet. Strange!!!

The following error message was generated on submitting the form (also for ISA server users):

The form cannot be submitted to the Web server either because your computer is offline or because the host server is currently unavailable. If this problem persists, contact your network administrator.

On closing the form users were then redirected to http://intranet (the URL that the form is published to in InfoPath) which of course they could not access.

The following post seemed exactly the same as our scenario:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sharepointworkflow/thread/111e0764-8342-4fb0-8d19-68d5a75ed45a/.

So, we added a Link Translation rule in the ISA Server to replace the FQDN InternalDomain with ExternalDomain (Without http://)

Eg:

https://internet.ourcompany.com

internet.ourcompany.com
The form is now working correctly for all users.

You cannot upload files that are larger than 28 MB on a Windows Server 2008-based computer that is running Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

In the morning, I was asked to upload a file of 110 MB in our picture/vedio library. When I tried to do it after chainging the maximum file size in Central Administration, I started getting following symptoms:

• Single File Upload via Document Library -- Nothing happens, you get a 404 page.


• Multiple File Upload via Document Library -- It seems to upload the file but then after the page refreshes, the file is nowhere to be found.


• Single or Multiple File Upload/Copy/Paste using open with Windows Explorer -- The file begins uploading but then towards the end you get the following error:
  Could not find this item
  This is no longer located in C:\filepath. Verify the item’s location and try again.

To resolve the above error, go to web.config of your web application and add following tags at the end of web.config:

<system.webserver>

<security>

<requestfiltering>

<requestlimits maxallowedcontentlength="file size in bytes">

</requestfiltering>

</security>

</SYSTEM.WEBSERVER>

Errors after installing Infrastructure update for MOSS 2007

During last month, I applied Infrastructure udate of SharePoint 2007 in my development envrionment and everything was working like a charm. So I decided to apply the same fix in my production environment this week.

Here I will like to mention one thing. I started this project as migration one where we were supposed to migrate MOSS 2007 + Windows 2003 environment to MOSS 2007 SP1 + Windows 2008 environment. So it was basically a restored farm.

After applying the Infrastructure upgrade, I started facing the issues:

"The resource object with key 'S2SearchAdminDashboard_Title' was not found" for Search Administration site

and

"The resource object with key 'S2LeftNav_Administration' was not found" for other search links.

After searching a while on Google, I was able to find the solution. Solution is quite simple. Sort all files within App_GlobalResources folder based on the date in the development environment where everything was working fine. Copy files which were modified on 3/25/2008. These will be the most new ones. Copy them over to the SSP virtual directory of your troubling farm within the same App_GlobalResources folder. These files are:

searchadmin.en-us.resx
SearchAdmin.resx
sps.en-US.resx
and sps.resx

Then if you will try, you will get the following error:

Could not find the sitemap node with URL '/SearchAdministration.aspx'.

Now this time, copy layouts.sitemap file which will be the most latest modified file within _app_bin folder from the development environment to production environment. As soon as that was copied over, the search administration page appeared fine.

Talking about Develop on SharePoint webcast series

Quote

Develop on SharePoint webcast series

In this 10-part series, you will receive practical technical information from Robert Bogue and Andrew Connell, Microsoft SharePoint Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), covering 10 fundamental developer topics on SharePoint Products and Technologies via Live Meeting Webcast.

20-May-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Web Parts. Register
21-May-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Data Lists. Register
27-May-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Silverlight and SharePoint. Register
28-May-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Using Event Handlers. Register
03-Jun-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Page Branding. Register
04-Jun-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Workflows. Register
10-Jun-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Web Services. Register
11-Jun-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Page Navigation. Register
17-Jun-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: User Management. Register
18-Jun-08 ... Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers: Custom Content Types. Register

Creating MOSS 2007 Theme

1. On the SharePoint server go to the Themes folder e.g. c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\Themes
   
2. Make a copy one of the existing theme folders and its contents rename it e.g. MyTheme.
   
3. Rename the .INF file within the MyTheme folder to MyTheme.INF
   
4. Edit MyTheme.INF.
   
   
   
   1. At the info section, Change the title, to MyTheme. Change codepage, e.g 22200, replacing the code page will fixing error “A theme with the name “MyTheme 1011″ and version already exists on the server.”
      
   2. In the titles section, rename the names to your new name. this section is to present the name in the different language.
   
   
5. Provide an image to give a preview of your theme. This image should be placed in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES. E.g. tmbMyTheme.gif
   
6. Modify the c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\Layouts\1033\SPTHEMES.xml to include a reference to the new MyTheme theme
   

   <Templates>
   <TemplateID>MyTheme</TemplateID>
   <DisplayName> MyTheme </DisplayName>
   <Description> MyTheme has a white background with blue control areas and orange highlights.</Description>
   <Thumbnail>images/tmbMyTheme.gif</Thumbnail>
   <Preview>images/ tmbMyTheme.gif</Preview>
   </Templates>

7. Modify the CSS within MyTheme folder to personalize your theme.
   
8. Run iisreset from the command prompt
   
9. Apply the new theme to a “test site”,.

Impersonation in SharePoint 2007 OM

Whenever you are developing anything for SharePoint 2007 and that piece of code needs to perform some admin tasks which are not possible with the current user context, you are left with no other option but to impersonate.

Impersonation within SharePoint 2003 was not so easy. Although you can find the helper class easily on Internet but still you need to add that class to your solution and perform few calls which sometimes becomes quite irritating. It was a common issue with SharePoint 2003.

Thankfully, that issue has been addressed in SharePoint 2007 and now we have impersonation as part of SharePoint OM. It is as easy as calling a delegate. If you are familier with anonymous methods, you can get the idea from the following piece of code that how easy it is to elevate user's rights within SharePoint 2007.

SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web;
SPUser user = web.CurrentUser;

// the calling user

// Uses the SHAREPOINT\system creds with the SPUser's identity reference of user SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate() {

web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;
SPList theList = web.Lists[listName];
SPListItem record = theList.Items.Add();
record["User"] = user;
// calling user
record.Update();
web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = false;

});

No more ISAPI Filter in SPS

All SharePoint developesl will be pleased to know that Microsoft has finally removed the ISAPI filter of SPS which sometimes becomes pain in the neck. Now all the requests will be processed by the ASP.Net ISAPI and the redirection will be controlled by HTTP Modules and Hanlders. So if you want to write your own hooks in the processing of SPS, you just have to write either handler or module. No more un-managed code.

Document Conversion in Office 2007

Currently I am working in Petroleum Development Oman for the implementation of Office 2007.

Here I have Office 2007, SQL and Domain Controller all installed on the same machine. While using document conversion services. I got error that failed to perform the action CE_Other. I tried all the options but failed to configure it. Finally, someone from Microsoft told me that Document Conversion services do not work on the DC. You need to use them from some other machines due to some reason. Well it is good thing that these services are not allowed to run on DC as they are working with the file system as well but it should be documented at some place.

Lets see what else will come.