Monthly Archives: October 2009

SharePoint Shop Talk Recap for Thursday 10/01/09

I’ve noticed that people seem to be waiting until the last minute to register for SharePoint Shop Talk sessions.  Last Thursday, at about 11:45AM, we had nine people register, which is a very small number.  However, at one point, we had 18 or 20 people signed in, so at least nine people signed up for it 45 minutes or less before the call.  I’m not complaining, just observing.

We had a full schedule of questions and discussion topics and couldn’t get to all of them.  As usual, we’ll pick up where we left off this coming Thursday.

Here’s the recap:

  • Vamshi asked about building a WSS environment that has SP1 and not SP2.  You can download that configuration here:

    http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4191A531-A2E9-45E4-B71E-5B0B17108BD2&displaylang=en.  And someone else suggested looking here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/bb400747.aspx.

  • We had a (welcome) surprise return visitor.  A few weeks previous, Blue had asked us a question that left everyone on the call a little sad because we couldn’t help.  His problem and solution are really fairly complicated, but it boils down to creating a data view web part with a range of filtered dates (not just one single filtered date, which is easier).  He may write up a blog entry on this and if does, I’ll link to it.  In the course of the discussion, he referred everyone to these two links:
  • Looping in SharePoint designer – can it be done?  The answer is “yes” in some narrow cirumstances.  However, to do it, you need to do some tricky stuff that is hard to conceptualize, hard to implement, hard to debug … it’s just plain hard.  The panel’s consensus – don’t do this if you can help it.  If you need looping, create custom actions or drop down into visual studio.  Of course, if you’re using SPD, you prob can’t easily drop down into VS, but it is what is is, sadly.
  • Speaking of sad, Nancy wins the “Make the Panel Sad” award by (futilely) asking about drag and drop from a data view web part.  The scenario is very interesting and if anyone has a clever solution, please let me know.  Here’s the problem: she has a DVWP that is doing some necessary filtering on a document library that returns back dozens or more documents.  This works great.  However, her users need to take those documents and burn them to CD.  This is doable using a windows explorer type view, but how to do it from DVWP?  We couldn’t think of a good answer.  Can you?
  • Laura Rogers, followed by Lori Gowan of www.endusersharepoint.com fame (and elsewhere) made us aware of the fact that attachments to InfoPath forms can be submitted via a web service to an image library in SharePoint.  Out of the box!  That is a very interesting fact with some very interesting implications.

That’s pretty much it.  I probably missed something, but hopefully you get the gist of it.

Even though I know you won’t actually sign up until noon, Thursday, here’s the registration link for the next session, Thursday 10/08 from 12:30 to 1:30 PM EDT: https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000043750/Registration.aspx?pageName=0z40kg9nb0t0842f

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