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SharePoint 2010 Quick Tip – Library Workflow Limits

We’ve seen this couple of times lately, so I thought I’d mention it. SharePoint 2007 and 2010 share a common guidance about restricting the number of lookup columns – people links, or links to another list. SharePoint performs best when there are eight or fewer. For most document libraries, the Created By and Modified By fields count for two of them, leaving six available lookup columns.

Sometimes, I’ve been asked to recommend a memory upgrade to boost performance of an existing SharePoint farm. In one case, the culprit was a SharePoint list with about 1000 items but more than 80 attached workflows. More recently, we saw really slow page load
times on a 2007 farm for a list with only three items – but, again, 25 attached workflows.

The catch is that by design, each SharePoint Designer workflow adds its own lookup column to each attached list or library. So if you have seven workflows, even if you
have no other fields, you’re already over the threshold.

Now, in SharePoint 2010, you can elevate this value in Central Admin, under Application Management | Web Application | General Settings | Resource Throttling. You might experiment with a value of 12 or 15.

 

But don’t just push the number high arbitrarily. It’s a Band-Aid, and not a complete solution. The reason the throttle exists is because SharePoint already uses complex SQL joins to get documents back from the content database. Here’s a wonderfully readable excerpt trapped by SQL Profiler – see all those LEFT OUTER JOIN LOOP Workflow lines?

SELECT TOP 1 @DocParentIdForRF = Docs.Id FROM Docs WHERE Docs.SiteId
= @SITEID AND Docs.DirName = @FDN AND Docs.LeafName = @FLN; SELECT TOP(@NUMROWS) t1.[SortBehavior] AS c0,t3.[tp_ID] AS c14c8, UserData.[nvarchar15], t9.[Status1] AS c21c16, t10.[Status1] AS c22c16, t1.[ScopeId] AS c4, UserData.[nvarchar4], UserData.[tp_CheckoutUserId], t2.[tp_ID] AS c6c8, t3.[nvarchar1] AS c14c7, t3.[nvarchar6] AS c14c10, t8.[Status1] AS c20c16, UserData.[tp_ModerationStatus], UserData.[tp_Level], UserData.[nvarchar17], CASE WHEN DATALENGTH(t1.DirName) = 0 THEN t1.LeafName WHEN DATALENGTH(t1.LeafName) = 0 THEN t1.DirName ELSE t1.DirName + N''/'' + t1.LeafName END AS c3, t2.[nvarchar1] AS c6c7, t2.[tp_Created] AS c6c11, UserData.[nvarchar14], t1.[TimeCreated] AS c2, UserData.[tp_Modified], UserData.[nvarchar3],
t2.[nvarchar6] AS c6c10, t7.[Status1] AS c19c16, UserData.[nvarchar19],
UserData.[tp_ID], t1.[IsCheckoutToLocal] AS c13, t5.[Status1] AS c17c16,
t6.[Status1] AS c18c16, UserData.[nvarchar16], t1.[LeafName] AS c1,
t1.[LTCheckoutUserId] AS c12, UserData.[tp_Editor], t3.[nvarchar4] AS c14c9,
t4.[Status1] AS c15c16, t1.[Type] AS c5, t3.[tp_Created] AS c14c11,
UserData.[nvarchar13], UserData.[nvarchar18], t2.[nvarchar4] AS c6c9,
UserData.[tp_ContentTypeId] FROM UserData INNER MERGE JOIN Docs AS t1
WITH(NOLOCK) ON (UserData.[tp_RowOrdinal] = 0) AND
(t1.SiteId=UserData.tp_SiteId) AND (t1.SiteId = @SITEID) AND (t1.ParentId =
UserData.tp_ParentId) AND (t1.Id = UserData.tp_DocId) AND ( (UserData.tp_Level
= 1 OR UserData.tp_Level =255) ) AND
(t1.Level = UserData.tp_Level) AND ((UserData.tp_Level = 255 AND t1.LTCheckoutUserId
=@IU OR (UserData.tp_Level = 1 AND (UserData.tp_DraftOwnerId IS NULL) OR
UserData.tp_Level = 2)AND (t1.LTCheckoutUserId IS NULL OR t1.LTCheckoutUserId
<> @IU ))) LEFT OUTER LOOP JOIN AllUserData AS t2
WITH(NOLOCK,INDEX=AllUserData_PK) ON (UserData.[tp_CheckoutUserId]=t2.[tp_ID]) AND
(UserData.[tp_RowOrdinal] = 0) AND (t2.[tp_RowOrdinal] = 0) AND ( (t2.tp_Level
= 1) ) AND (t2.[tp_IsCurrentVersion] = CONVERT(bit,1) ) AND
(t2.[tp_CalculatedVersion] = 0 ) AND (t2.[tp_DeleteTransactionId] = 0x ) AND
(t2.tp_ListId = @L3) AND (UserData.tp_ListId = @L4) LEFT OUTER LOOP JOIN
AllUserData AS t3 WITH(NOLOCK,INDEX=AllUserData_PK) ON
(UserData.[tp_Editor]=t3.[tp_ID]) AND (UserData.[tp_RowOrdinal] = 0) AND
(t3.[tp_RowOrdinal] = 0) AND ( (t3.tp_Level = 1) ) AND
(t3.[tp_IsCurrentVersion] = CONVERT(bit,1) ) AND (t3.[tp_CalculatedVersion] = 0
) AND (t3.[tp_DeleteTransactionId] = 0x ) AND (t3.tp_ListId = @L3) AND
(UserData.tp_ListId = @L4) LEFT OUTER LOOP JOIN Workflow AS t4 WITH(NOLOCK) ON
( CAST ( CAST (UserData.[nvarchar13]AS VARBINARY) AS UNIQUEIDENTIFIER)=t4.[ID])
AND (UserData.[tp_RowOrdinal] = 0) AND (t4.SiteId = @SITEID) AND (t4.WebId =
@WEBID) AND (t4.ListId = UserData.tp_ListId) AND (t4.ItemId = UserData.tp_Id)
AND (UserData.tp_ListId = @L4) LEFT OUTER LOOP JOIN Workflow AS t5 WITH(NOLOCK)
ON ( CAST ( CAST (UserData.[nvarchar14]AS VARBINARY) AS
UNIQUEIDENTIFIER)=t5.[ID]) AND (UserData.[tp_RowOrdinal] = 0) AND (t5.SiteId =
@SITEID) AND (t5.WebId = @WEBID) AND (t5.ListId = UserData.tp_ListId) AND
(t5.ItemId = UserData.tp_Id) AND (UserData.tp_ListId = @L4) LEFT OUTER LOOP
JOIN Workflow AS t6 WITH(NOLOCK) ON ( CAST ( CAST (UserData.[nvarchar15]AS
VARBINARY) AS UNIQUEIDENTIFIER)=t6.[ID]) AND (UserData.[tp_RowOrdinal] = 0) AND
(t6.SiteId = @SITEID) AND (t6.WebId = @WEBID) AND (t6.ListId =
UserData.tp_ListId) AND (t6.ItemId = UserData.tp_Id) AND (UserData.tp_ListId =
@L4) LEFT OUTER LOOP JOIN Workflow AS t7 WITH(NOLOCK) ON ( CAST ( CAST
(UserData.[nvarchar16]AS VARBINARY) AS UNIQUEIDENTIFIER)=t7.[ID]) AND
(UserData.[tp_RowOrdinal] = 0) AND (t7.SiteId = @SITEID) AND (t7.WebId =
@WEBID) AND (t7.ListId = UserData.tp_ListId) AND (t7.ItemId = UserData.tp_Id)
AND (UserData.tp_ListId = @L4) LEFT OUTER LOOP JOIN Workflow AS t8 WITH(NOLOCK)
ON ( CAST ( CAST (UserData.[nvarchar17]AS VARBINARY) AS UNIQUEIDENTIFIER)=t8.[ID])
AND (UserData.[tp_RowOrdinal] = 0) AND (t8.SiteId = @SITEID) AND (t8.WebId =
@WEBID) AND (t8.ListId = UserData.tp_ListId) AND (t8.ItemId = UserData.tp_Id)
AND (UserData.tp_ListId = @L4) LEFT OUTER LOOP JOIN Workflow AS t9 WITH(NOLOCK)
ON ( CAST ( CAST (UserData.[nvarchar18]AS VARBINARY) AS
UNIQUEIDENTIFIER)=t9.[ID]) AND (UserData.[tp_RowOrdinal] = 0) AND (t9.SiteId =
@SITEID) AND (t9.WebId = @WEBID) AND (t9.ListId = UserData.tp_ListId) AND
(t9.ItemId = UserData.tp_Id) AND (UserData.tp_ListId = @L4) LEFT OUTER LOOP
JOIN Workflow AS t10 WITH(NOLOCK) ON ( CAST ( CAST (UserData.[nvarchar19]AS
VARBINARY) AS UNIQUEIDENTIFIER)=t10.[ID]) AND (UserData.[tp_RowOrdinal] = 0)
AND (t10.SiteId = @SITEID) AND (t10.WebId = @WEBID) AND (t10.ListId =
UserData.tp_ListId) AND (t10.ItemId = UserData.tp_Id) AND (UserData.tp_ListId =
@L4) WHERE ( (UserData.tp_Level = 1 OR
UserData.tp_Level =255) AND (
UserData.tp_Level= 255 AND UserData.tp_CheckoutUserId = @IU OR ( UserData.tp_Level = 2 AND UserData.tp_DraftOwnerId IS NOT NULL
OR UserData.tp_Level = 1 AND
UserData.tp_DraftOwnerId IS NULL ) AND ( UserData.tp_CheckoutUserId IS NULL
OR UserData.tp_CheckoutUserId <> @IU))) AND
(UserData.tp_SiteId=@SITEID AND (UserData.tp_ParentId=@DocParentIdForRF)) AND
(UserData.tp_RowOrdinal=0) AND (t1.SiteId=@SITEID AND (t1.ParentId=@DocParentIdForRF)) ORDER BY t1.[SortBehavior] DESC ,t1.[LeafName] ASC ,UserData.[tp_ID] ASC OPTION (FORCE ORDER, MAXDOP 1)'

Runaway workflow generation is better handled through systems design. That’s a much bigger topic, but here are some concepts to get you started:

• Consolidate your designer workflows into fewer, but more sophisticated workflows. You don’t need here separate workflows to send a task to three separate people – you need one workflow that asks which person should receive the task.
• Hide your workflow lookup columns from most list views. (Not always practical.)
• Divide your workflows among different sites and lists, if your process can logically support it.
• Use Event Receivers for server side processing instead of SharePoint Designer workflows.

Good luck!

Field mapping in SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services – where was that screen again?

I just had a great weekend at SharePoint Saturday East Bay – many thanks to all the attendees, and organizers – especially Christian Buckley and Michael Noel.  I presented on Business Intelligence on SharePoint, as well as IT management and upgrade.  (My slide decks will be up shortly.)

One of the key enabling technologies for business intelligence is the Business Connectivity Service.  Business Connectivity Services replace the SharePoint 2007 BDC (Business Data Catalog).  In the BCS world, there’s a new Content Type called “External Content”.  External Content refers to a data set -- such as orders, customers, products – that live in an external database but look like a read/write SharePoint list in the browser.  BCS is also able to write data – an extension to the read only functions in the 2007 BDC.

 BCS is configured in SharePoint Designer 2010.   During my presentation, I had a guest ask me where to configure the mappings between fields in an external list and the data source.  (It’s one of those “where did that screen go again” moments that can happen when you have only a few jetlagged minutes between sessions).  I answered her in email yesterday, and here’s the answer for everyone else.  (It’s not like its buried deep in the tool or anything…)   To access the screen:

• Connect to the target site in SharePoint Designer
• Select External Content Types in the Left Hand Menu
• Select the Data Source
• Click Edit External Content Type button in the Ribbon
• In the next screen, click the Operations Design View button in the Ribbon
• Under the External Content Type Operations double click the operation you need to modify (usually Read List)
• Click through the wizard to the Return Parameter Configuration screen

 
Hope this helps!  Now, back to Sunday NFL games…

Microsoft TechEd 2010 Day 4 Recap

Hello from decidedly unsultry New England!  (Not in New Orleans anymore!)  Last Thursday was the final day of TechEd 2010, and we stayed right up to session-ing through the very end.  Followed, of course, by the closing party at Mardi Gras World. 

 

Previous posts in this series:

• Day 1 Recap
• Day 2 Recap
• Day 3 Recap
• SharePoint Adoption Strategies -- TechEd Session Recap

I promised to recap all four days, and although I’ll admit to a bit of conference fatigue by Day 4, let me summarize the highlights:

· Visual Studio 2010 makes the template generation for SharePoint 2010 development almost automatic.   VS2010 also comes with a code generation utility to speed the reference of entity classes, and allows deployment directly from the IDE.  SO when I say you can build a data presentation Web Part in 10 minutes – OK, maybe it’s really 12 – but still.

· Silverlight is also a great way to write data aware code for external data sources, such as Dynamics CRM.

· SharePoint Designer 2010 generates WSP-formatted workflows that can be imported to Visual Studio – however, it’s a one way trip – you can’t necessarily reimport the workflow back to SPD.

· Microsoft’s current business online offerings – BPOS -- offer services like SharePoint and SQL.  How do you get a cloud service to reflect your corporate secure identity – usually tie3e3d to Active Directory?  At present, most login integration is handled by a client Windows “tray” program that links your ID to your online ID.  This is expected to evolve over the 36 months:

o   Next, your online identity will be kept in sync with your AD identity using a Microsoft DirSync appliance – the client utility goes away.

o   The final stage if this evolution will use Active Directory federated identity services (ADFS) 2.0 along with the DirSync appliance to offer full two way trust and synchronization over secure services.

· SharePoint 2010 will soon be offered as a cloud hosted multi-tenant service.   One thing to expect is a lack of direct access to the file system.  This means to expect “sandboxed” solutions – no visual web parts or ASCX files, for example.  Setting the VS2010 output to “sandboxed” solution will trim the IDE IntelliSense” settings to help avoid developing unsupported code.

· Finally.  5pm Thursday.  Marc Russinovich, the original developer of the Sysinternals web site, ran a huge audience through troubleshooting techniques – mystery server reboots, failing SSRS reports, suddenly disconnected IE clients.  .  Mark is often the internal escalation pain of last resort inside Microsoft.  The best recommendation was to visit www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals and download the free Process Explorer, Process Monitor, and AutoRuns to expose extra performance details.  Want to change the color of the fables Blue Screen of Death?  Now, you can.

OK, back to Boston.  Go Red Sox, go Celtics, go Patriots (hey, training camp starts next month!)  Thanks for reading, and see you at TechEd 2011 in Atlanta!

SharePoint 2010 Preview

Greetings from sunny Las Vegas!  With Steve Ballmer’s announcements this morning at Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference 2009, I can finally tell you all the great new things coming in SharePoint 2010.

I was greatly privileged to get a head start working with an early version of SharePoint 2010.  Some to these features, as always, may be revised as we get closer to the ship date (which I don’t know, sorry.)   I’ll have more to share as the week progresses, and more detail coming over the next few months, but here’s a summary of some of Microsoft’s key investments in the new platform:

Sites:

SharePoint 2010 supports IE7/8 as expected – but also adds full support for Firefox and Safari.  It will be easier than ever to create and customize attractive pages for your sites.  Many SharePoint 2007 sites still remain focused on the document library, with the somewhat clunky Content Editor Web Part used to update page content.  Branding was largely limited to the in the box themes, unless users were comfortable with CSS. 

SharePoint 2010 now favors an inline content editor that uses wiki syntax, along with a theme builder right in the browser UI.  Multilingual support is greatly enhanced, and there’s much better support for managing and serving digital media (audio/video) directly from SharePoint.  In addition, “OWA” now means Office Web Access – there’s a browser based, server hosted version of almost all Office applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, One Note, and Outlook.

 

 

Communities

Social networking – especially Facebook and Twitter – have exploded in the three years SharePoint 2007  was released.  Enterprise users have come to expect the same types of Web 2.0 interactions from their enterprise web platforms.  SharePoint 2010 makes good on the promise by adding or extending contemporary social networking, including:

· Twitter style microblogging

· LinkedIn style expertise finding

· Facebook-like wall posts,

· Digg/Del.icio.us tagging,

· User-driven ratings (1-5 stars, etc.)

· Wikis and blogs

· People/expertise search

· RSS feeds [not new]

 In addition, there a fantastic new Silverlight based org chart browser, which relies on your Active Directory information to generate a real-time navigational view of your enterprise hierarchy.

 
 Content

Library support gets better – you can now hoist up to 50 million items in a library, and there’s a new out of the box Document Center template designed to offer an optimal experience for a larger (500,000) item doclib.

Records management also gets a big overhaul – when you declare a document a “record”, you can now leave behind a “shortcut” link to point to a new location in the Records Center, or you can manager an official record in place.

But probably most exciting is the new Managed Metadata Service.  MMS will let you define a central hierarchy of document tags and groups and share them across multiple web applications and site collections.  There’s also support for watching enduser-defined tag trends (“folksonomy”) and promoting commonly used terns to the enterprise standard store.

 
MMS tags and ratings are also surfaced through the UI as navigational elements, both in documents libraries and in search results.  You can reach across content anywhere in your farm to find all documents tagged as “Marketing”, for example. 

 
  

For knowledge management, this means you can define your knowledge taxonomy independent of a physical or organization hierarchy, to be able to find relevant information wherever it lives.

Search

Microsoft has made greater improvement in the 2010 search platform.  Relevance engines are refined to help show more accurate results from the outset.  There’s also better support for federated search (pulling in remote search engine results) and faceted search (drilling down through results by tags, dates, or other classifications. 

 

Microsoft’s acquisition and integration of the FAST reporting engine, extends these great capabilities further.  Let’s suppose that you work in construction.  A search for “Windows” is likely to mean different things to a glass designer than an IT professional.  FAST allows you to customs results based on a user's role.  FAST can also find and interpret metadata embedded in documents -- such as locations, dollar values, and dates – without users need to add keywords.  FAST results can show better previews and full results counts in refinement “facets” (the left hand navigators above).

Insights

Performance Point dashboards and Excel Services are well integrated in the new release, allowing much simpler deployment of interactive data modeling solutions.  Dashboards may be Excel oriented for drilldown through very large data sets using an optimized Excel interface (this is part of “Project Gemini”).  Or business processes can be monitored and exposed as diagrams using the hosted Visio Services.

There’s also a great new Chart Web Part that can tie out to all these rich data sources.  Charts can be extended using the “Decomposition Tree” to let you drill back, graphically, through a chart to find elements that contributed most or least significantly:

 

 

Composites

SharePoint 2010 is a stronger application platform than ever.   Three key investments here:

· InfoPath becomes the tool of choice for customizing end user list and forms without coding

· SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio add support for publishing all enhancements as WSP packages, which can be shared across the spectrum of development complexity (a WSP solution can also be extended in Studio, etc.)

· SharePoint joins the BCS.  No, SharePoint 2010 isn’t angling for a Fiesta Bowl bid – it’s the new Business Connectivity Services, which replaced the 2007 BDC (Business Data Connector).  In the BCS world, there’s a new Content Type called “External Content”.  External Content refers to a data set -- such as orders, customers, products – that live in an external data but look like a read write SharePoint list in the browser.  External Content can also be republished to other applications, such as Excel or Outlook 2010.

Infrastructure

Some upfront fundamentals.  SharePoint 2010 will be a 64 bit only platform.  Direct upgrades from 32 bits servers to 64 bit servers will require some advance prep work.  The basic requirements:

· Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 X64

· SQL Server 2005 x64 SP3 CU3

o   Or

· SQL Server 2008 x64 SP1 CU2

On the client side, Internet Explorer 7/8, Firefox and Safari will all be supported.  However, IE6 will not be supported, so IT shops that had been deferring that upgrade should plan accordingly.

In the Office 2010 suite, Groove has been rebranded as SharePoint Workspace 2010.  Workspace gives a full range of offline, synchronized access to SharePoint forms and lists, in addition to the document library support already provided under Groove 2007.

Finally, there are some much-needed enhancements to the core server infrastructure:

· Services “a la carte” – rather than using one monolithic Shared Service Provider, you can mix and match among User Profile support, BCS, MMS, Excel Services, Visio Services, etc., to only deploy services you need.

· The code “sandbox”, which allows untrusted end user code to run in a throttled environment to prevent runaway code form impacting the rest of your farm

· Elimination of the indexer as a single server, single point of failure in larger farm topologies.

In general, Microsoft has extended an already rich product even more.  As we’ve seen before in SharePoint, Microsoft likes to introduce a raft of new feature and refine them in the next release.  The core document manegement, search, data access and personalization features are likely to be the most robust.  Newer functions, such as multitenancy, often require more care in implementation and training.  For example, when should you use an MMS keyword instead of a tag store?  Or how best should we control multiuser editing in Excel Web Services or Word?

Obviously, I’m still wrapping my head around all the new features, and will have more to share soon.  Thanks for reading.

SharePoint Centralized custom master pages and navigation - Part IV: Setup and Installation

Today, we'll wrapup our walkthrough of Sharepoint customization and deployment.  We're going to cover automated installation of packaged SharePoint WSP files.  We've already covered the topics below on master pages, features, and packaging:

· [Part I] Master page customization to add centralized navigation support to the master page (as well as some other changes to enable Ajax for a related project).  The navigation was based on Marian Dumitrascu’s article at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/SharedNavigationProvider.aspx

· [Part II] Centralized publishing of common master pages, using Heather Solomon’s techniques outlined at http://heathersolomon.com/blog/articles/servermstpageforsitecollect_feature.aspx

· [Part III] Packaging of the feature as a WSP file, using the WSPBuilder application from Codeplex (http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder)

· [Part IV] Automated installation of the solution package, using the SharePoint Installer from Codeplex (again!) at http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointinstaller

Deployment

If you don’t want to use command line tools to deploy your file, you can use the handy Sharepoint deployment utility (also from Codeplex!) at http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointinstaller/  to create a setup ZIP file with your wsp file.  The installer is relatively straightforward.  Extract the contents to a new folder, and then revise those contents as needed.  Here are the changes you need to make inside the sample file:

· Remove the sample wsp

· Adjust the text of the EULA as appropriate.

· Edit setup.exe.xml to change the following values:

o   FeatureID – use the GUID generated above for the feature.  It needs to match the value in feature.xml.

o   SolutionID – this is the GUID in the solutionid.txt file from the WSPBuilder project

o   SolutionFile – the full name of your WSP

o   Solution Title – As appropriate

o   Solution Version – Incrementing this number is a good practice on successive deployments.  It will help your server decide how to handle a reinstallation for a higher version – should it be an upgrade or a repair.

o   Logo Image – Optional.  You’ll need to add the file and adjust the size to get it to fit.  60X35 has been a good size for me.

o   FeatureScope = Site

That’s it!  Zip up those files into a new Zip file and you’re done.  Users can then take that zip file and install the solution on the farm just be extracting the contents and clicking setup.exe.

One last note – how do you test the deploy if you’ve been working on a server that already has the solution installed?  You’ll need to clean out the old files:

· Make a backup copy of the current feature folder I the 12 hive

· Deactivate the feature from any site collections where it was tested

· Use stsadm –o uninstallfeatuure –name CustomMasterPages to uninstall the feature

· IISReset

· You may still have orphaned copies of the master page in the site collection gallery.  It’s usually impossible to delete them directly, but, there’s a trick that usually works/

o   Using SharePoint Designer, navigate to the _catalogs\MasterPage gallery.

o   Create a temporary folder

o   Move the custom master pages to the folder

o   Delete the folder

· Remove the custom feature folder

Now you can use the installer to deploy your new master page feature to the Sharepoint farm.

Once the feature is installed, any changes you make to the deployed master pages in the 12 hive will be immediately reflected in all sites where the feature is activated and the pages are used.   You could also repackage and redeploy the new files.

Hope this was a good exercise for you.  Remember the steps:

· Customize the master pages to support centralized navigation

· Use a feature to publish a central set of master pages

· Package the feature as a WSP file

· Automate the installer to use setup.exe

Good luck, and please let me know if you have any questions!

SharePoint Centralized Custom Master Pages and Navigation - Part III: WSP Packaging

We're continuing our series on SharePoint customization to focus on packaging our new feature for ease of deployment.  Parts I and II have already covered master page customization and feature creation.  Today we'll show you how to use Visual Studio to generate a WSP solution for your Sharepoint feature.

· [Part I] Master page customization to add centralized navigation, based on Marian Dumitrascu’s article at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/SharedNavigationProvider.aspx

· [Part II] Centralized publishing of common master pages, using Heather Solomon’s techniques outlined at http://heathersolomon.com/blog/articles/servermstpageforsitecollect_feature.aspx

· [Part III] Packaging of the feature as a WSP file, using the WSPBuilder application from Codeplex (http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder)

· [Part IV] Automated installation of the solution package, using the SharePoint Installer from Codeplex (again!) at http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointinstaller

Packaging

At this point, we're almost done.  However, there are two additional steps to package this as a complete deployment – packaging and installation.

For packaging, we’ll use the fine WSPBuilder tool to package the feature as a wsp file.  WSPBuilder can be downloaded from Codeplex at http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder.  It installs as a project template into Visual Studio 2008.

Now that our feature is ready, start a new project in Visual Studio as a Visual C# / WSPBuilder project.  You’ll see that the template generates a new solutionid.txt GUID for you automatically.  This is different from the feature GUID above.  We’ll use both in the final step.

You’ll  also see the 12 folder has already been created for you.  You will need to create the hierarchy of templates \ features \ [featurename], and under that the en-us and masterpages folders.  (There's no need to create the empty folders such as PageLayouts.)

Now, use the right mouse  Add | Existing Item… context menu to copy the feature.xml and provisionedfiles.xml to the FeatureName folder of your project.  Next, import the master page to the masterpages folder, and the preview image (if you used one) to en-us.  Last, use the Tools | WSPBuilder | Build WSP menu item to create your package.  (By default, your WSP file will be in the root folder of the solution.)

 

SharePoint Centralized Custom Master Pages and Navigation - Part II: Publishing the feature

Today we're going to continue our walk through a practical integration and deployment exercise.    This began as a project to add centralized global navigation schemes to a custom SharePoint master page.  We're going to extend that today to use publishing features to share the master page itself across multiple site collections.  Each of these is covered in a separate post:

· [Part I] In the first post, we introduced master page customization to add centralized navigation support to the master page

· [Part II] Centralized publishing of common master pages, using Heather Solomon’s techniques outlined at http://heathersolomon.com/blog/articles/servermstpageforsitecollect_feature.aspx

· [Part III] Packaging of the feature as a WSP file, using the WSPBuilder application from Codeplex (http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder)

· [Part IV] Automated installation of the solution package, using the SharePoint Installer from Codeplex (again!) at http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointinstaller

Defining Common Master Pages

This technique in this section is adapted from, and indebted to, Heather Solomon’s excellent article on the topic at http://heathersolomon.com/blog/articles/servermstpageforsitecollect_feature.aspx

1.  In your server’s “12 Hive” (usually c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12) go to the Features directory inside the TEMPLATE folder.    Copy the PublishingLayouts folder to a new folder in the root of Features.  The folder name will become the name for your new feature.  Here, we’re using CustomMasterPages.

2.  Open the new folder, and clean out all subfolders, leaving only Feature.xml and ProvisionedFiles.xml. To create a clean file set, at a minimum clear out the contents of each sub folder in the directory (en-us

3. Copy/paste content from original master pages to new pages outside the database [Notepad].  See above for typical edits.

4. Edit the ProvisionedFiles.xml file in Notepad.  We are going to delete most of the content and keep only the OSGMasterPages Module tag and the PublishingLayoutsPreviewImages Module tag.  [See text below.]  We use one node for each master page file (this solution has three master pages.)

<!-- _lcid="1033" _version="12.0.6301" _dal="1" -->

<!-- _LocalBinding -->

<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">

    <Module Name="OSGMasterPages" Url="_catalogs/masterpage" Path="MasterPages" RootWebOnly="TRUE">

    <File Url="001.master" Type="GhostableInLibrary">

    <Property Name="ContentType" Value="Title 001" />

    <Property Name="PublishingPreviewImage" Value="~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/$Resources:core,Culture;/Preview Images/0016.gif, ~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/$Resources:core,Culture;/Preview Images/0016.gif" />

    <Property Name="MasterPageDescription" Value="Description 001" />

    </File>

    <File Url="002.master" Type="GhostableInLibrary">

    <Property Name="ContentType" Value="Title 002" />

    <Property Name="PublishingPreviewImage" Value="~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/$Resources:core,Culture;/Preview Images/0016.gif, ~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/$Resources:core,Culture;/Preview Images/0016.gif" />

    <Property Name="MasterPageDescription" Value="Description 002" />

    </File>

    <File Url="003.master" Type="GhostableInLibrary">

    <Property Name="ContentType" Value="Title 003" />

    <Property Name="PublishingPreviewImage" Value="~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/$Resources:core,Culture;/Preview Images/0016.gif, ~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/$Resources:core,Culture;/Preview Images/0016.gif" />

    <Property Name="MasterPageDescription" Value="Description 003" />

    </File>

    </Module>

    <Module Name="PublishingLayoutsPreviewImages" Url="_catalogs/masterpage" IncludeFolders="??-??*" Path="" RootWebOnly="TRUE">

    <File Url="0016.gif" Name="Preview Images/0016.gif" Type="GhostableInLibrary">

    </File>

    </Module>

</Elements>

9.Create a preview image in the language folder (in this case, en-us).  Local Drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\CustomMasterPages\en-us.  As you can see above, we are using a file named 0016.gif.

Next, open Feature.xml file in Notepad. 

· Change the Feature ID to a unique GUID.  You can generate GUIDs in Visual Studio, (Tools - Create GUID - Registry Format - Copy).   If you don’t have Visual Studio, get it!  In the meantime, you can also use a neat online site to get a new one at http://www.guidgen.com.   Paste the new GUID into the Feature ID node (don’t keep any brackets).

<Feature Id="FDFCD4C4-F0D9-43b5-8739-A33681049657"

· Update the title:  Title="Custom Master Pages"

· Update the description: Description="Custom master pages for use across multiple site collections."

· Change the Hidden state to False: Hidden="False"

Save the Feature.xml file.   You should wind up with something like this.

<!-- _lcid="1033" _version="12.0.4518" _dal="1" -->
<!-- _LocalBinding -->
<Feature  Id="1e5ad034-4b11-4dcc-9e73-0208740d45a5"
  Title="Custom Master Pages"
  Description="Custom master pages from XXXXX to use in multiple site collections"
  Version="12.0.0.1"
  Scope="Site"
  Hidden="FALSE"
  DefaultResourceFile="core"
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
    <ElementManifests>
    <ElementManifest Location="ProvisionedFiles.xml"/>
    </ElementManifests>
</Feature>

At this point, we could use stsadm -o installfeature -name YourFeatureDirectoryName to install the feature, and then activate and test it.  But we’re going to go further and package the solution for automated installation.

Page Not Found Error

If you get any odd “file not found” or “page not found” errors, you may have used SharePoint Designer (SPD) to modify the master pages.  SPD may change the code automatically to remove the tilde and leading slash from some of the console registrations in your master page.

Original:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="wssuc" TagName="DesignModeConsole" src="~/_controltemplates/DesignModeConsole.ascx" %> 

SPD Alterations: 

<%@ Register TagPrefix="wssuc" TagName="DesignModeConsole" src="_controltemplates/DesignModeConsole.ascx" %>

To avoid this, don’t  open master pages for final editing using Sharepoint Designer.  Use Notepad  or similar tools to work on the file outside the content database.

SharePoint Centralized custom master pages and navigation - Part I: Master Pages

There are a lot of academic Sharepoint exercises that cover the elements of this project, but today we're going to walk through a practical integration and deployment exercise.    This is a great real example of WHY you’d want to centralize master pages definitions in the first place.

One of our clients wanted to start breaking their burgeoning site hierarchy into a set of separate site collections and contents databases largely to keep their database sizes reasonable.  However, their site is highly branded, so they wanted to minimize the extra admin work of synchronizing Sharepoint master pages among multiple collections.  In addition, they had several changes they wanted to make to their master pages to enable Ajax-based controls on their sites.   They also wanted to have all the sites point to one primary site collection to define global navigation, so that changes made there would also replicate without further administration.

For this project, we had already installed the binaries for the third party Ajax control and a custom theme for the site.  Also, the Publishing infrastructure is required on all sites where this is deployed, so MOSS is a requirement.

As a result, this project became an integration and customization drawing upon several significant online code sources,  We're going to cover each of these in a separate post:

· [Part I] Master page customization to add centralized navigation support to the master page. The navigation was based on Marian Dumitrascu’s article at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/SharedNavigationProvider.aspx

· [Part II] Centralized publishing of common master pages, using Heather Solomon’s techniques from http://heathersolomon.com/blog/articles/servermstpageforsitecollect_feature.aspx

· [Part III] Packaging of the feature as a WSP file, using the WSPBuilder application from Codeplex (http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder)

· [Part IV] Automated installation of the solution package, using the SharePoint Installer from Codeplex (again!) at http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointinstaller

Master Page Customization and Centralized Navigation:

Please visit http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/SharedNavigationProvider.aspx for a comprehensive discussion of the centralized navigation. 

Essentially, that article provides a DLL that you add to the Global Assembly Cache on all your servers.   Once the DLL is installed, you will add a section to web.config to define a new SiteMap provider:

<add name="SharedNavigationProvider"  SourceSite="http://[sourcesite]" NavigationType="Global" EncodeOutput="true" type="DataQ.SharePoint.Providers.SharedNavigationProvider,    SharedNavigationProvider, Version=1.0.0.0,  Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=fc448b9e121af773" />

Then you add will update your current master page(s) to add a control to point to the new navigation data source.   We strongly recommend copying the content of your base master pages to a new file that lives, for the moment, outside the SharePoint site.  Using SharePoint Designer to make these edits can have unintended consequences, so we’ll use notepad for now.  [More below!]

Underneath the TopNavigationDataSource control, add this control noted below.  TIP: don’t just replace the existing navigation data source.  It needs to “live” inside the Template_Control node, and the new source needs to be outside.  Lastly, you’ll update the ASPMenu navigation to point to the ID of the new data source, here “topSiteMap2”.  [There are other changes that may be required for DisplayValues, etc. – please see Marian’s article for more details.

<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderHorizontalNav" runat="server">

   <SharePoint:AspMenu

     ID="TopNavigationMenu"

     Runat="server"

     DataSourceID="topSiteMap2"

     EnableViewState="false"

     AccessKey="<%$Resources:wss,navigation_accesskey%>"

     Orientation="Horizontal"

     StaticDisplayLevels="1"

     MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels="1"

     DynamicHorizontalOffset="0"

     StaticPopoutImageUrl="/_layouts/images/menudark.gif"

     StaticPopoutImageTextFormatString=""

     DynamicHoverStyle-BackColor="#CBE3F0"

     SkipLinkText=""

     StaticSubMenuIndent="0"

     CssClass="ms-topNavContainer">

  <StaticMenuStyle/>

  <StaticMenuItemStyle CssClass="ms-topnav" ItemSpacing="0px"/>

  <StaticSelectedStyle CssClass="ms-topnavselected" />

  <StaticHoverStyle CssClass="ms-topNavHover" />

  <DynamicMenuStyle  BackColor="#F2F3F4" BorderColor="#A7B4CE" BorderWidth="1px"/>

  <DynamicMenuItemStyle CssClass="ms-topNavFlyOuts"/>

  <DynamicHoverStyle CssClass="ms-topNavFlyOutsHover"/>

  <DynamicSelectedStyle CssClass="ms-topNavFlyOutsSelected"/>

   </SharePoint:AspMenu>

  

   <SharePoint:DelegateControl runat="server" ControlId="TopNavigationDataSource">

  <Template_Controls>

  <asp:SiteMapDataSource

  ShowStartingNode="False"

  SiteMapProvider="SPNavigationProvider"

  id="topSiteMap"

  runat="server"

  StartingNodeUrl="sid:1002"/>

  </Template_Controls>

   </SharePoint:DelegateControl>

<asp:SiteMapDataSource

  ShowStartingNode="False"

  SiteMapProvider="SharedNavigationProvider"

  id="topSiteMap2"

  runat="server"/>

</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

There were some other updates that were needed to these master pages, notably adding an assembly reference and script manager for a third party Ajax control.  These two lines went before the first HTML tag:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="wssuc" TagName="DesignModeConsole" src="~/_controltemplates/DesignModeConsole.ascx" %>

<%@ Register TagPrefix="XXXXXX" [deleted] %>

And this line goes after the first <FORM> tag

<asp:ScriptManager runat="server" ID="ScriptManager1" />

Remember earlier when we discussed the importance of editing in Notepad?  Sharepoint Designer can rewrite the src tag of the DesignModeConsole reference to remove the tilde, which causes errors when the page is deployed to the site.  If you are seeing errors, make sure the wssuc tagprefix entries are properly formatted as noted above.