SharePoint

Another SharePoint Content Deployment Issue

AnneBougie — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:38:05 GMT

The fantastic 40 templates from Microsoft can cause issues with content deployment. The following error prevents content deployment with the templates installed:

1. The content type name cannot contain: \ / : * ? " # % < > { } | ~ &, two consecutive periods (..), or special characters such as a tab. at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContentType.ValidateName(String name) at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContentType.ValidateNameWithResource(String strVal, String& strLocalized) at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContentType.set_Name(String value) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.ContentTypeSerializer.UpdateContentTypeMetaData(SPContentType sourceContentType, SPContentType targetContentType, String contentTypeXml) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.ContentTypeSerializer.UpdateContentType(SPContentType sourceContentType, SPContentType targetContentType, String contentTypeXml, ImportObjectManager importObjectManager) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.ContentTypeSerializer.ProcessContentType(SPContentType sourceContentType, String contentTypeXml, ImportObjectManager importObjectManager, Boolean IsParentSystemObject) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.ContentTypeSerializer.SetObjectData(Object obj, SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context, ISurrogateSelector selector) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.XmlFormatter.ParseObject(Type objectType, Boolean isChildObject) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.XmlFormatter.DeserializeObject(Type objectType, Boolean isChildObject, DeploymentObject envelope) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.XmlFormatter.Deserialize(Stream serializationStream) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.ObjectSerializer.Deserialize(Stream serializationStream) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.ImportObjectManager.ProcessObject(XmlReader xmlReader) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.SPImport.DeserializeObjects() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.SPImport.Run()

To fix this error, the Fields.xml file located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\TSATypes\Fields.xml needs to be modified. This xml file contains many entries where the field id is set to a Guid. The problem is that this Guid contains curly braces in it: <Field ID="{38F29346-B895-4ece-9BD6-90C7D1E6DA95}". These braces need to be removed.

Make a copy of this file before making modifications in case you have problems after making this change. Then simply do a find and replace on "{ and }" and remove the braces.

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SharePoint Content Deployment Issue

AnneBougie — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:01:18 GMT

The following error can occur during content deployment:

The changeToken refers to a time before the start of the current change log.

The changeToken refers to a time before the start of the current change log. at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.SPExport.ThrowInvalidChangeTokenError(DateTime minChangeTime, Int32 minChangeNumber) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.SPExport.GetIncrementalChanges() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.SPExport.CalculateObjectsToExport() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.SPExport.Run()

Content deployment job 'Entire site' failed.The exception thrown was 'Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException' : 'The changeToken refers to a time before the start of the current change log.'

This error happens when more than 15 days have passed since the last deployment, and you have the job set to use incremental deployment. The fix is really easy. You just have to change the deployment options on the deployment job to deploy all content instead of deploying only new or changed content. Run the content deployment once, then you can change back to incremental deployment.

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SharePoint Adventures - Reading an Excel Spreadsheet From A Stream

AnneBougie — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:40:12 GMT

When I needed to read an Excel spreadsheet from a SharePoint site, it seemed like a simple enough request. Previously, whenever I needed to open an Excel file, I used an OleDb connection with the following connection string:

string connectionString = @"Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;
       Data Source={0};Persist Security Info=False;
       Extended Properties=""Excel 12.0;HDR=YES""";
connectionString = string.Format(connectionString, filePath);

Of course, you can't open the file from the SharePoint site this way. So, my first hurdle was to figure out how to download the file from the web site. The System.Net namespace provides a very easy way to do this:

WebClient client = new WebClient();
client.UseDefaultCredentials = true;
Stream stream = client.OpenRead(url);

Now I had my file as a stream, so I thought I'd just extract it, save it to a temporary file, then read it in in the usual way. Problem solved. This next bit of code should probably be optimized a little so I'm not resizing the array every single loop:

BinaryReader brdr = new BinaryReader(stream);
byte[] result = new byte[0];
int bufferSize = 32768; // 32k
byte[] buffer = new byte[bufferSize];
long pos = 0;

while (true)
{
      buffer = brdr.ReadBytes(bufferSize);
      if (pos > 0)
      {
            // copy old data to bigger result
            byte[] temp = new byte[result.LongLength];
            Array.Copy(result, temp, result.LongLength);
            result = new byte[temp.LongLength + buffer.Length];
            Array.Copy(temp, result, temp.LongLength);
            // add new data
            for (int i = 0; i < buffer.Length; i++)
            {
                result[pos + i] = buffer[i];
            }
            pos += buffer.Length;
      }
      else
      {
            result = new byte[buffer.Length];
            Array.Copy(buffer, result, buffer.Length);
            pos = buffer.Length;
      }
      if (buffer.Length < bufferSize)
            break;
}
string tempFile = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("TMP"),
      "CopyList.xlsx");
using (var fs = new FileStream(tempFile, FileMode.OpenOrCreate))
{
      var writer = new BinaryWriter(fs);
      writer.Write(result, 0, result.Length);
      writer.Close();
      fs.Close();
}

This worked beautifully on my development machine, but this is part of a larger program that is manipulating a SharePoint site via the SharePoint API. Therefore, it has to run on the server, which is 64-bit. When I first ran it, I received the error "The 'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0' provider is not registered on the local machine" . So, I did a little digging around, and found out that maybe I needed to install the driver. It is available from Microsoft as a separate download, so I thought I was good to go. I installed it, and was still receiving the same error. Huh??!! Then I did a little *more* digging, and found out that there is no OleDb driver for opening Excel files on a 64-bit machine. Fine. No problem. Just compile the project as x86, and I'm good to go. Right? Well, wrong, actually. When the project is compiled in 32-bit, I can't access the SharePoint sites. Aaaaarrrrrrrhhhh! What to do? Then, I'm looking all over, trying to find a way to read an Excel file directly from a stream. How hard can it be, right?

<SARCASM>
Actually, Microsoft has this really handy little guide that tells you just how to do it. It's only 349 pages. Turns out Excel's native format is something called a BIFF (Binary Interchange File Format). So, you just have to parse all the bytes from the stream into the right format. What a treat!
</SARCASM>

I know who I'd like to BIFF about now. Anyway, I did *even more* digging around, and I found some code from someone who has done just that. Excel Data Reader Thanks, iciobanu! However, it only works for Excel 2003 format. Now that is finally a problem I can easily solve! Save the spreadsheet to 2003 format, and read it in. Are we there yet? Almost! I was getting errors because the stream object returned from the web download didn't support seeking, which this code relies on. So, save the stream out to a temp file (back to that again), and read it back in as a FileStream object, which supports seeking, and my problems are, at long last, solved.

And that is how you open an Excel file from a SharePoint site into a spreadsheet without using a generic OleDb connection. Sucess at long last! Isn't there some famous quote somewhere about persistence paying off?

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Part 1: Copy a SharePoint List Programmatically

AnneBougie — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:18:43 GMT

I've been working with the SharePoint API lately. One of my tasks is to copy SharePoint lists from one site to another site. This can be done in code as long as the two sites are on the same machine. It's OK if they are in different web applications, but it can't be from one server to another. If you need to copy from one server to another, you either need to do an export/import, or find a way to save the settings and import them on the new machine. I believe you can use the SharePoint Web Services to accomplish this, though. I haven't worked with that yet.

Anyway, it took a lot of digging around to figure out all the things I needed to copy lists, so I thought I'd post the code that is working for me. This post is only going to cover copying a basic list. I am planning on several more posts to handle document libraries, wikis, and other special cases. Each has their own challenges.

The requirements for me are to copy the bulk of the lists of a large SharePoint site to a new site with a different structure. Therefore, content and deploy is not going to work. Also, they are redesiging the pages, so they really only wanted the lists. What I'm doing is creating a new list on the new site and copying all the properties, so any metadata, such as who last modified the list, is unfortunately lost.

Here's the code:

// Instantiate web instances
SPSite sourceSite = new SPSite(@"http://SharePointServer:31001");
SPWeb sourceWeb = sourceSite.RootWeb;
SPSite destSite = new SPSite(@"http://SharePointServer:31002");
SPWeb destWeb = destSite.RootWeb;

// Get a reference to the source list
SPList sourceList = sourceWeb.GetList("/Lists/Announcements");

// if the list exists on the destination site, delete it
try
{
   SPList temp = destWeb.Lists[sourceList.Title];
   destWeb.Lists.Delete(temp.ID);
}
catch { }

// create new list on the destination web with same properties
Guid newListID = destWeb.Lists.Add(sourceList.Title, sourceList.Description,
                                   sourceList.BaseTemplate);
SPList destList = destWeb.Lists[newListID];

// copy items
foreach (SPListItem item in announcements.Items)
{
   SPListItem newDestItem = destList.Items.Add();
   foreach (SPField field in sourceList.Fields)
   {
      if (!field.ReadOnlyField)
      newDestItem[field.Id] = item[field.Id];
   }
   newDestItem.Update();
}

// set quicklaunch settings
destList.OnQuickLaunch = sourceList.OnQuickLaunch;
destList.Update();

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