HttpCode

Just a quick tip, if your crawling external sources with the MOSS (or Enterprise Search), you might find that your crawl doesn’t finish or hangs, it might be worthwhile checking to see if the site you are crawling has a calendar with links:

You will need to determine the URL and then add a crawl rule to exclude that path, the crawler will see an infinite number of pages (it thinks each date and next link is a separate page).

I recently had a project where I needed to bind some business objects to a SPGridView in a web part, which on its own is trivial, but I also needed to create the columns for the SPGridView on the fly, since a number of business objects could be rendered in this control.

The main problem was the naming of these columns, if I just bound them directly to the Grid, I would get the ugly naming of my properties (I say it’s ugly, it’s actually pretty awesome if your a developer, but those pesky end users like pretty names).

The sample grid looks like this by default:

So what I came up with isn’t exactly new or innovative, I created a custom attribute called Alias:

    public class AliasAttribute : System.Attribute
    {
        protected string[] aliasName;

        public AliasAttribute(params string[] alias)
        {
            this.aliasName = alias;
        }

        public string[] Alias
        {
            get { return aliasName; }
            set { aliasName = value; }
        }
    }

This attribute gets applied to each property on your business object with a pretty name:

        [Alias("Internet URL")]
        public string InternetAddress
        {
            get { return internetAddress; }
            set { internetAddress = value; }
        }

Now the code that performs the binding looks for properties with a custom attribute and pulls out the alias as the HeaderText:

BoundField newBoundField = new BoundField();
newBoundField.HeaderText = Helpers.GetPropertyAlias(field.Trim());
newBoundField.DataField = field.Trim();
grid.Columns.Add(newBoundField);

public static string GetPropertyAlias(string propertyName)
{
    //Change the next line for your business object ..
    PropertyInfo[] propInfos = typeof(BusinessObject).GetProperties();

    foreach (PropertyInfo propInfo in propInfos)
    {
        if (propInfo.Name.ToUpper().Equals(propertyName.ToUpper()))
        {
            object[] attribs = propInfo.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(AliasAttribute), true);
            foreach (object attrib in attribs)
            {
                if (attrib is AliasAttribute)
                {
                    AliasAttribute alias = (AliasAttribute)attrib;
                    //return the alias
                    return alias.Alias[0];
                }
            }
        }
    }

    //if we don't find the custom attribute, just return the same value we passed in
    return propertyName;
}

The end result is a nice pretty grid:

A sample project can be found here.

If you work in an organisation that has an organisation hierarchy it might be worth setting this up within MOSS, so that when you view a user’s profile you will get the following view:

This is driven off the Manager profile field, it can be setup so that it is driven off either active directory or a custom source such as a SQL database in which case the BDC will need to be used. The Colleague suggestions and notifications make use of the organisation hierarchy as well, so it is worthwhile to set it up.

One thing but, regardless of your localisation settings, the heading ‘Organization Hierarchy’ will be spelt with a ‘z’, so for us Aussie’s we just have to cop the American spelling.

The SharePoint Capacity Planning tool can be found here. The executive overview can be found here.

The process of creating a model is very simple:

The UI is wizard based and it asks a number of questions, it's all high level stuff that shouldn't present any issues:

The notes from the overview point out that the tool gives a first approximation, we’ve found that it does a good job recommending hardware, but that the topology of the recommended farms could use some extra thought.

For example, if you created a single intranet site with 25000 users with a heavy collaboration usage profile, the tool will recommend 6 servers, 2 of which are SQL Servers. The tool recommends 3 web front ends and an index server.

Now I’m sure this would work fine, but some questions you could ask are:

Could adding a dedicated web front end that isn’t in the load balanced cluster but that is used to service the indexer add to the performance of the site, since the crawler isn’t competing with end users for resources?

The tool doesn't go into the logical architecture of the SharePoint farm, it's purely hardware related.

Overall I think the tool is very worthwhile, your planning should definitely include running this tool, but don’t let this tool do all the work, do a little bit of thinking for yourself.

If you run your SQL Server on a non standard port you may have experienced issues when installing SharePoint on this server. The standard psconfig utility has a field for the server name, if you give it a comma and then the port your SQL box is running on it will fail. The psconfig wizard doesn't understand the port number format. This isn't just related to SharePoint, I had to use this same trick when I was doing a Great Plains install.

The trick is to create an Alias, first run 'cliconfg', you should be presented with the following UI:

Select the Alias tab, then Add - you should then see the above dialog. Now you just need to enter the server alias, I normally just make this the server name, but your circumstances may be different, then unselect the 'Dynamically determine port' checkbox so you can enter the port number that your SQL Server runs on.

Once the Alias is setup you can refer to the SQL Server by the server alias that you have setup here.

I found this fantastic post today that I just had to comment on:

The idea is to use JQuery to perform a select 'All' on all the checkboxes in a list.

DannyE posted this JavaScript:

$(”.ms-RadioText[title=’All’] :checkbox”).click(function(){
   var otherids = (this.id).substring(0, (this.id).length-2 );
   $(”input[id^=’”+otherids+”‘]”).attr( “checked” , (this.checked)?”checked”:”" );
});

It looks for all the items with the ms-RadioText class that also have a Title attribute that equals 'All', it adds a click handler that will then toggle the checked status of the checkbox, its extremely cool, way better than the latest block buster movie ...

Anyway, that's all well and good, I'm not adding much value reposting his stuff, so I'd just like to improve on his deployment recommendation.

Instead of adding a script reference to the master page and then inserting a content editor region to paste the JavaScript in, I would suggest using the JQuery Script Manager:

So the idea is to use SharePoint Designer to register the control with the JavaScript. Note here to use the ScriptTemplate you'll have to grab my latest script manager control from here.

<cc1:jQueryManager ID="JQueryManager1" runat="server">        
<ScriptTemplate>
$(".ms-RadioText[title='All'] :checkbox").click(function(){
 var otherids = (this.id).substring(0, (this.id).length-2 );
 $("input[id^='"+otherids+"']").attr( "checked" , (this.checked)?"checked":"" );});
</ScriptTemplate>
</cc1:jQueryManager>

This will insert the JQuery Script Manager and declaratively add the JavaScript code to the page. This way you don't need to worry about the script resources or having multiple client side load functions.

How can you not love JQuery after seeing the power of the above code? it's just that awesome!

I've previously posted a demo that illustrated a tag cloud web part, I've now posted the code.

First let me warn you that the method I've used to get the tag list will not scale, so please disregard the TagBuilder method, you'll need to implement that yourself.

I've based this tag cloud control loosely on the tag cloud control from codeproject, I've refactored most of it, but have kept the maths behind generating a weighting.

Using the control is pretty simple, you just need to measure the tags and then pass in a collection of CloudItems:

//tagList is a dictionary with the tag and count
Dictionary<string, int> tagList = new Dictionary<string, int>();

foreach (string tag in tagList.Keys)
{
    CloudItem cloudItem = new CloudItem();
    cloudItem.Text = tag;
    cloudItem.Weight = tagList[tag];
    cloudItem.Href = "/SearchCenter/Pages/Results.aspx?k=tags:" + tag;
    Items.Add(cloudItem);
}

There are a number of ways to perform the measurement, if you were to count the number of times a tagged resource was accessed, you would end up with a heat map of popular items. Alternatively you could simply count up the number of times a tag has been used (I think this is the most common use, I've done it this way in my demo). In any case the exact implementation details have been left up to you.

The web part that I'm presenting today is more of a building block, it doesn't do much on its own. It makes use of the JQuery Corners Plugin.

To set the corner types you can modify the Corner Type setting:

The above example will cause the following JavaScript to be output:

jQuery('cornerDiv').corner('tr 25px');

This web part makes use of the JQuery Script Manager that I've posted about previously.

As usual the source can be found here.

A screencast of the control in action can also be found here.

I've just rolled off a project that made use of the Business Data Catalog (BDC), I thought I'd share my experiences.

Firstly I'll give a quick heads up on the BDC, you've probably seen a diagram similar to the following one, basically it shows all the features in MOSS that hang off the BDC:

 Business Data Web Parts - These are the out of the box list web parts, they provide enough functionality out of the box to at the very least expose the user to the data.

SharePoint Lists - A user can create a column of type 'Business Data' this is very handy for end users, for example they may want to create an Asset register for locations, the locations that are relevant to them maybe exposed via the BDC, this would then save the user the task of maintaining the location list.

 Search - Provide a consistent search experience across all the enterprise data.

 User Profile Importer - Use business data to enhance the profile information you have about your user base, from the example above, you could import the base location into your profile property, then web parts could be built to personalise the information that is displayed to you.

 Custom Solutions - Use the BDC as a data access layer.

So anyway the application that I did some work on fits into the custom solution box mostly, but with a little bit of thought you can generally make it cross over a number of areas (search, profile import etc) and by doing so create a greater experience for your end users.

For example, our BDC profile import process imported a whole range of properties, one in particular was a business unit code. So by creating a custom metadata property, the people search was able to become a business unit people searcher. We then build some custom web parts that visualised the data on some maps and in some other ways that were relevant to the business, we constructed links that pointed to the people search which made use of the location code, much in the same way that I created tag links in the search demo.

We added the BDC data to the search centre but changed the result links to point to pages with our custom web parts, so now the search centre feeds into the custom visualisations, so no matter where the user comes from, either search or navigation they are going to get sucked into our experience.

So my tips are simple:

• Plan your navigation experience - does search play a part in your experience?, its such a powerful concept to ignore, more people especially the younger generation are very search centric.
• The BDC is best for read only type data - do you need to push back information? might be other easier ways to go about it.
• Try to use all the options like web parts, search and profile information to be part of your overall custom solution.
• Can users use your data in lists? Would it make the end users job easier?