Paul Galvin's SharePoint Space

My Workflow Book is Available to Purchase

By Paul Galvin, on November 21st, 2011

I first started talking with my original co-authors over two years ago. They eventually abandoned the project, but late this summer, with the help of several new co-authors, I was finally able to bring this across the finish line.

Professional Workflow in SharePoint 2010: Real World Business Solutions hit Amazon and the Barnes and Noble web site some time in the last 10 days. It’s available in paperback and Kindle/Nook and all of that, just in time for a great Christmas present. Smile

This book is about two things: 1) empowering end users so that they can solve their own business problems using SP 2010 workflow capabilities and 2) helping IT staff (developers in particular) do the same. About two thirds of the book are targeted at what I call “Activist Users” (highly skilled but non-technical and motivated end users). It tries to explain how to craft solutions in SharePoint 2010 using SharePoint Designer workflow and a number of additional SharePoint features.

The last third is aimed squarely at the developer. However, unlike some of the purely technical books on the market, these chapters explain how SharePoint developers can create functionality that further empowers those activist users by means of custom SharePoint Designer activities and other technical bits. By empowering the activist users in your organization, you free up your development team (or just yourself) to do the really hard (and typically more technically interesting) stuff that end users can never do and never should try on their own.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll write up more about the book, including fluffy stuff like “how is it like to write a book” that I know a lot of people are interested in knowing about. First up – I’ll introduce my co-authors without whom this book would never have survived to see the light of day.

Read more about the book on the Amazon web site.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

SharePoint Web Part UI Design Pattern Using XSL

By Paul Galvin, on October 18th, 2011

I’ve been giving a talk this year on on a design pattern for SharePoint web parts where the UI is entirely managed via XSL.

I plan to write this up in greater detail over the next period of time. In the mean time, here is the PowerPoint.

The source code for this project is up on CodePlex here: http://webpartsxsl.codeplex.com/.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Interesting iPhone Application

By Paul Galvin, on October 17th, 2011

The mobile team here at Slalom has developed a really cool iPad application that combines virtual reality augmentation w/ offline capability to provide what may be the best New York subway finder and routing app available today.

Here’s the site describing the app in more detail: http://www.nycstationfinder.com/.

I don’t have any Apple products so I can’t test it out myself, but it looks pretty cool. I’m hoping they port it over to Android soon.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

MVP Again

By Paul Galvin, on July 11th, 2011

Microsoft re-awarded me with SharePoint MVP on July 1st this year and it’s no less exciting than it was the first time four years ago.

The SharePoint community is just an amazing place. I remember when I was first introduced to SharePoint by my old employer, Conchango. I was not happy about it Smile . I had been living in a BizTalk world for a year or two leading up to my job there and before that, worked in another insular world of people and companies that made a living off of Progress Software. I say “insular” because the SharePoint world is anything but!

I’m continually glad and excited to be part of this bizarre online community of people that feel strangely compelled to blog endlessly, give up their Saturdays for free conferences, haunt online forums, build all kinds of whacked out free products to put up on CodePlex and a myriad of other community efforts of all shapes and sizes.

I don’t know what it is about this product that inspires such volunteerism and immersion, but I hope it never changes.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Let Shining Examples Lead the Way to Increased SharePoint Adoption

By Paul Galvin, on June 24th, 2011

My first “pure” BrightStarr blog entry was published today. Here’s a teaser:

There’s been a lot of conversation on the Internets of late on the topic of SharePoint adoption and especially the lack thereof. No one wants to go to all the trouble of designing a farm and security infrastructure, participating in workshops, putting together a snazzy look and feel, working out a rock solid information architecture that can withstand the vicissitudes of company re-orgs and finally, a fanfare-filled rollout just to discover three months post go-live that less than 50% of the company employees are using SharePoint and most of them are using it to replace the old network file servers ("the S:\ drive").

No silver bullet (or single blog post) is going to solve that problem. However, there are lot of things you can do to reduce the risk of an anemic SharePoint portal. One such technique is the "Shining Example Pattern."

I’d love to know about other SharePoint adoption strategies that you care to share. If you do share, please leave as a comment on the BrightStarr blog.

Read the whole thing here: http://www.brightstarr.com/US/Pages/blog-view.aspx?BlogID=52

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

“Access Denied” to Default.aspx on a SharePoint 2010 Sub Site

By Paul Galvin, on June 7th, 2011

One of my clients went live with their SharePoint 2010 environment today. We discovered that a certain group of users couldn’t access their default home page. SharePoint responded with “Access Denied” and the usual “sign in as another user” or “request access” response.

When we used the nifty “Check Access” function it confirmed that the end users really did have access. Yet, they could not get to the page.

I followed a lot of roads to various dead ends until I decided to compare the web parts on the broken page against a similar working page. I did that by putting the page in maintenance mode by adding “?contents=1” to the page. So, it looked like “http://server/subsite/subsite/default.aspx?contents=1”.

This showed me two web parts named “Error” with a description like “Error” on the broken page. I didn’t think to take a screen cap at the time.

I removed them and that solved the problem.

I’ve seen a question like this come up on the forums in the past and I was extremely skeptical about the poster’s insistence that he had security set up properly. I *know* I had security set up right Smile Next time, I’ll be more open and less skeptical.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

XSLT and jQuery Samples

By Paul Galvin, on June 1st, 2011

I have been doing a lot of of XSLT and jQuery and thought I’d share a few snippets that others may find useful in future.

Example 1: Emit simple JavaScript / jQuery in XSLT:

<xsl:template match="something" xml:space="preserve">

<!– Blank out the query friendly filters hidden field –>
<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function(){
      $("#QueryFriendlyFilters").val("empty");
    });
</script>

</xsl:template>

That bit emits some JavaScript that waits for the page to finish loading (because of the $(document).ready(…)) and then sets the value of a hidden field named QueryFriendlyFilters to the literal value “empty”.

Example 2: Use <xsl:if> to check “greater than”, “less than”, etc.

<xsl:template match="something" xml:space="preserve">

<div id="fdcAllFilters">

    <xsl:if test="@Count>0">
      <span class="fdcFilterLabel">Current filters:</span>
    </xsl:if>

    <!– more stuff happens here. –>

</xsl:template>

The above snippet checks to see if an attribute named “Count” of the “something” element is greater than zero. The XML behind this would be something like:”

<something Count=”5” />

Example 3: Iterate through all elements, interspersing jQuery calls.

<!– Iterate through all the filters and display the correct links. –>
<xsl:for-each select="UserFilter">

<a class="FilterHref" href="javascript:mySubmitPage(‘RemoveUserFilter’,'{@ID}’)">[X]</a>

<span class="fdcFilterLabel"><xsl:value-of select="@FilterValue"/></span>

<script type="text/javascript">

    $(document).ready(function(){
        <xsl:text><![CDATA[$("#QueryFriendlyFilters").val( ($("#QueryFriendlyFilters").val() + " ]]></xsl:text>\"<xsl:value-of select="@FilterValue"/>\"<xsl:text><![CDATA["));]]></xsl:text>
    });

</script>

</xsl:for-each>

The above snippet is the most complex and there may be easier ways to do it.

The XML behind this looks roughly like this:

<UserFilter ID=”123” FilterValue=”xyzzy” />

This snippet is iterating through <UserFilter> nodes.

It first emits an anchor tag that when clicked invokes a JavaScript function that is already on the page, “mySubmitPage” and passes the value of an attribute on the <UserFilter> node named “ID”.

It then emits some jQuery that waits for the page to load. That jQuery updates a hidden field named “QueryFriendlyFilters” by adding the value of the FilterValue attribute. Note all the crazy <xsl:text> and <![CDATA[ … ]]> stuff.

That’s it, hope it helps!

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

PerformancePoint and Error 33494

By Paul Galvin, on May 31st, 2011

One of my clients called today when their PerformancePoint environment (in SharePoint 2010) broke down. One of the app servers in the farm was running low on disk space. While addressing that, the client uninstalled “too much” and the PP stuff all stopped functioning. Various web parts would show “An unexpected error occurred. Error 33494. Additional details have been logged for your administrator”:

I looked up the error and didn’t find anything specific to “Error 33494” but this MSDN forums posting was helpful: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/sharepoint2010setup/thread/E1FE189D-7F89-455D-A98B-C1A12D8626AB

I found ADOMD.NET here as a component in the SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=228DE03F-3B5A-428A-923F-58A033D316E1&displaylang=en

(click to enlarge)

I download and installed that and it fixed everything.

I think this is a pretty oddball kind of error, but if you hit it, you at least you have an option.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Lists.asmx, GetListItems and Folders

By Paul Galvin, on May 23rd, 2011

I was doing some research for someone today around the list.asmx web service provided as part of SharePoint 2010 (and earlier). She was able to get the list items at the root folder (including the names of sub-folders), but couldn’t get items in sub-folders. I did some looking around on the internets and it’s a surprisingly common question. Yet, I couldn’t get a good answer to the simple question, “if I know the folder, how do I get the items in the folder?” To be honest, I didn’t try all that hard since I’ve wanted to figure this one out on my own for a while Smile .

To set this up, I created a site named “Blogging Scenarios” and a custom list named “Custom List with Sub Folders”. I then created folders named:

Year 2005
Year 2006
Year 2007

I added a few items to the folder “Year 2006”. This is what it looks like:

My friend isn’t writing C# code but rather using Java, so the SOAP envelope was what she really needed. To get that, I wrote a bit of jQuery and then used fiddler to get the actual HTTP conversation.

Here’s the relevant jQuery (I copied the code down below if you want to copy/paste):

They first key is to include both a <queryOptions> and <QueryOptions> node. The second key is that the <Folder> node is a URL to which the client has access.

There may be other ways to get this, but this worked well for me when using jQuery.

Here is the SOAP envelope for the above:

<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv=’http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/’>
<soapenv:Body>
    <GetListItems xmlns=’http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/’>
      <listName>Custom List with Sub Folders</listName>
      <viewFields>
        <ViewFields>
          <FieldRef Name=’Title’ />
          <FieldRef Name=’EncodedAbsUrl’ />
        </ViewFields>
      </viewFields>
      <queryOptions>
        <QueryOptions>
          <Folder>http://demoserver1/Blogging Scenarios/lists/Custom List with Sub Folders/Year 2006</Folder>
        </QueryOptions>
      </queryOptions>
    </GetListItems>
</soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

A lot of examples and discussion around this led me to believe that all I need was <QueryOptions> and specify a folder name. For me, I need to both wrap it inside <queryOptions> as well as specify a fully qualified URL for the <Folder> node.

Here’s the jQuery AJAX setup:

$(document).ready(function() {
       var soapEnv =
           "<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv=’http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/’> \
               <soapenv:Body> \
                    <GetListItems xmlns=’http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/’> \
                       <listName>Custom List with Sub Folders</listName> \
                       <viewFields> \
                           <ViewFields> \
                              <FieldRef Name=’Title’ /> \
                              <FieldRef Name=’EncodedAbsUrl’ /> \
                          </ViewFields> \
                       </viewFields> \
                       <queryOptions> \
                         <QueryOptions> \
                           <Folder>http://demoserver1/Blogging Scenarios/lists/Custom List with Sub Folders/Year 2006</Folder> \
                         </QueryOptions> \
                       </queryOptions> \
                   </GetListItems> \
               </soapenv:Body> \
           </soapenv:Envelope>";

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

SPD Workflow Patterns, Tips and Tricks

By Paul Galvin, on May 19th, 2011

I gave my presentation today at SharePoint Fest in Denver. Here’s the PowerPoint presentation itself: http://www.mstechblogs.com/paul/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/SharePointFest.pptx

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Paul Galvin's SharePoint Space

Tools

Archives

My Workflow Book is Available to Purchase

SharePoint Web Part UI Design Pattern Using XSL

Interesting iPhone Application

MVP Again

Let Shining Examples Lead the Way to Increased SharePoint Adoption

“Access Denied” to Default.aspx on a SharePoint 2010 Sub Site

XSLT and jQuery Samples

PerformancePoint and Error 33494

Lists.asmx, GetListItems and Folders

SPD Workflow Patterns, Tips and Tricks

Recent Posts

Blogroll

Meta

Tools

Popular posts

Archives

Recent Posts

Blogroll

Meta