MOSS

Get all replies to a discussion

shehan — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:40:00 GMT

A discussion list in unlike a normal list in that it consists of two content types - a Discussion content type that maps to the discussion topic and a Message that maps to all replies to the topic. If you examine the Discussion content type you’ll see that its inherited from the Folder content type.

The reply contains a field called ‘ParentFolderId’ and as the name suggests it holds the ID of the discussion topic. So naturally if you were to do a query on the list for all items with the same ParentFolderId you would expect the query to work. However, since the topic is of a folder content type and the replies are contained within the ‘folder’ you would need to set the queries ViewAttributes property to "Scope='Recursive'" for it to return results.

Below is an example using the object model:

SPQuery query = new SPQuery();

query.ViewAttributes = "Scope='Recursive'";

StringBuilder queryString = new StringBuilder();

queryString.Append("         <Where>");

queryString.Append("              <And>");

queryString.Append("                        <Eq>");

queryString.Append("                             <FieldRef Name=\"ContentType\" />");

queryString.Append("                             <Value Type=\"Text\">Message</Value>");

queryString.Append("                        </Eq>");

queryString.Append("                        <Eq>");

queryString.Append("                             <FieldRef Name=\"ParentFolderId\" />");

queryString.Append("                             <Value Type=\"Number\">99</Value>"); //NOTE: change this to the value you need

queryString.Append("                        </Eq>");

queryString.Append("              </And>");

queryString.Append("         </Where>");

query.Query = queryString.ToString();

DataTable replyTable = discussionList.GetItems(query).GetDataTable();

Technorati Tags: Discussion,Replies,CAML,SharePoint

Change the format of the 'Created By' field in a page layout

shehan — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:13:26 GMT

I was creating a custom page layout for a publishing site and one of the requirements was to display the 'Created By' field. Piece of cake, I thought, all I need to do was to all add the following:

<SharePointWebControls:TextField FieldName="Created_x0020_By" runat="server"/>

However, this resulted in the field being rendered in the format- 'domain\username'. But on the 'View Properties' (DispForm.aspx) for the page the Created By field shown at the bottom of the page is in the correct format -'FirstName LastName'.

After some experimenting and researching this is the tag I had to use to get the correct format:

<SharePoint:FormField ID="FormField1" ControlMode="Display" FieldName="Author" DisableInputFieldLabel="true" runat="server"/>

Note: the 'SharePoint' tag prefix for the above maps to:

<%@Register TagPrefix="SharePoint" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls"%>

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Created By,Page Layout

Deploying Web Parts to farms with more than 1 WFE

shehan — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:50:47 GMT

If you're developing webparts using VSeWSS and going to run the setup.bat that that VSeWSS creates, you might need to modify the deploy solution line before running it.

The deploysolution instruction that VSeWSS adds contains the -local argument. This is all good if you're going to run it on an implementation with only 1 WFE, but for farms with 2 or more WFE's then you will need to change -local to -immediate.

I also make it a habit to call the execadmsvcjobs command before and after adding and deploying.

Technorati Tags: WSS,MOSS,VSeWSS

Search only items of a custom list

shehan — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:27:33 GMT

Had a requirement where search results should be limited to only items of a list. Naturally, I created a new Search Scope and set a rule of type Web Address to include the particular site holding the lists.

Well...it did work, but not to my expectations. What was happening was that in addition to displaying the list items, the list views were also being displayed and so were other pages in the site....DOH!

Doing a search on the net led me to this site. It was very informative, but it didn't provided the contentclass value I should use for a list created using the Custom List template....

Took me a while, but eventually tracked down the contentclass value - "STS_ListItem_GenericList"

So, long story short; here are the two rules I used for the scope:

Rule1:
Scope Rule Type: Web Address
Folder: <the site I need to search>
Behavior: Include

Rule 2:
Scope Rule Type: Property Query
Property Query: contentclass = STS_ListItem_GenericList
Behavior: Require

Technorati Tags: moss,search,scope

Truncate the characters displayed in a blog post

shehan — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:35:04 GMT

This is how to reduce the number of characters displayed in a blog post on the default.aspx page of a blog site created from the OOTB SharePoint blog template.

Open up the site in SharePoint Designer
Open the default.aspx and switch to Code View
Perform a Find & Replace for the following:
- Find-
  - ```
  &lt;Field Name="Body"/&gt;
```
- Replace-
  - ```
  &lt;Limit Len="99" IgnoreTags="TRUE" MoreText="..."&gt;&lt;Column Name=&quot;Body&quot;/&gt;&lt;/Limit&gt;
```

This would limit the number of characters to 99 and display the text contained in the MoreText attribute as the last characters. Check out this for more info on the Limit element.

Do remember to back up the page before attempting this just in case.... ;)

Display Search Scopes in the Search DoropDown and Advanced Search page

shehan — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:15:27 GMT

Most of you all would probably be knowing this, but for the newbie out there who is just getting into MOSS's Enterprise Search features this would probably prove useful...

Lets say that through the SSP Search Configurations page you've gone and created a couple of Scopes. But when you get back to your site collection you notice that none of the scopes appear in the search scope dropdown (normally located on the top right hand corner of the page), you only see the default scopes.

What you need to do is navigate to Site Settings page (_layouts/settings.aspx) of the top most level site and once there click on the ‘Search keywords’ link under the ‘Site Collection Administration’ section.

In the Scopes page you will notice that all the custom scopes created are contained in the ‘Unused Scopes’ section while the ‘Display Group: Search Dropdown’ contains ‘All Sites’ and ‘People’ while the ‘Display Group: Advanced Search’ contains only ‘All Sites’.

Click the ‘Search Dropdown’ link and add the Scopes by checking the appropriate ones. Do the same for the ‘Advanced Search’ link.

Once done, the custom scopes will appear on all search dropdowns in the site, however they will not appear on the default Advance Search page.

To get the scopes to appear on the Advanced Search page, navigate to that page (SearchCenter/Pages/advanced.aspx) and from the 'Site Actions' menu select 'Edit Page'. The page will now be checked out to you and be in the edit mode.

In the 'Advanced Search Box' web part click the 'edit' menu and then select 'Modify Shared Web Part'. The properties box for the web part appears. Expand the 'Scopes' section and check the 'Show the scope picker' option. Hit OK and the web part should update showing the scopes.

Remember to check in and publish the page so your changes will be seen by everyone who access the page.

Change the "Welcome" link font color

shehan — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 23:18:33 GMT

As part of configuring enterprise search for a company's portal, one of the requirements was changing the look and feel of the SearchCenter. In short, they wanted a very Google like UI - I.e. nothing too flashy or heavy.

So, I started off creating a minimal master page and adjusting the layouts - nothing major just positioning the controls etc.. Now, to change the appearance of the webparts required modifications to the default styles located in the core.css file and thanks to Heather Solomons CSS Reference Chart this was pretty much easy. But when it came to changing the font color of the "Welcome" link, changes to the styles mentioned by her weren't working....

Took me a while, but managed to find the solution by examining the source of the generated web page. Seems that the style in use for the font color of the "Welcome" link is: .ms-SPLink A:link,.ms-SPLink A:visited

To change the font color, modify the existing class like:

.ms-SPLink A:link,.ms-SPLink A:visited
{
color: #FFFFFF; /*#2A4666; this is the font color for the "Welcome" Link*/
text-decoration:none;
}

and if you want to change the font color on mouse over then add a new class:
.ms-SPLink A:hover
{

color: #66FFFF; /*this is the font color for the "Welcome" Link - mouse over*/
text-decoration:none;
}

Do remember that changes to the core.css file will result in changes that will be reflected all over the portal. So, if you only want the change to appear in on site don't go change the cosre.css file....

Highlight Search Results

shehan — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 01:38:47 GMT

OOTB the Search Core Results webpart simply emphasizes the search string you entered in the Search Box by wrapping it within the tags. But let’s say you need to highlight the search terms in different colors; what do you do? Write a new results webpart? No! you only need to adjust the Search Core Results XLS.

This is how it’s done:

Open up the XLS editor and copy the contents to notepad or some other editor (if your fine with editing it in the MOSS’s default editor, go right ahead)
Search for the term <xsl:template match="ddd">
Just below that you will see :

<xsl:template match="c0">

<xsl:value-of select="."/>

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="c1">

<xsl:value-of select="."/>

</xsl:template>

And this goes on till “c9”. The values “c0” to “c9” correspond to the search terms you entered, where “c0” is the first, “c1” is the second and so on…

Replace this with something like:

<xsl:template match="c0">

 

 <xsl:value-of select="."/>

 

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="c1">

 

 <xsl:value-of select="."/>

As you can see I’ve used the style “background-color” to give each search term its own color.

Once done copy the updated XLS file back to the webpart and save

Searching for "microsoft sharepoint server"

with the default XLS:

with the modified XLS:

Technorati Profile

Crawl Log Exporter

shehan — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:44:36 GMT

As part of setting up Enterprise Search for a major IT company, I had to create content sources for a number of web sites hosted on the company’s intranet. Pretty easy you say, well yes. But the problems arose when MOSS began crawling the websites.

There were more Crawl Errors in the crawl log than Crawl Successes. Seems that the web applications MOSS was crawling were not being maintained properly and there were loads of broken links. Naturally, I pointed this fact out to the administrators and naturally they asked me for the list of broken links, etc. Well, if there were only a couple of errors I could easily copy and paste the offending URLs, but these sites had loads and I couldn’t find an “export log” feature, drat!!!

Right, so the only option was to cook up a little C# winform application to export the crawl log. Easier said than done :) Other than for MSDN I couldn’t find anything else online to get me started, so, had to use Reflector quite a bit to figure out the internal workings of the assemblies, but managed to get something going….

I’ve uploaded the complied application on ProjectDistributor and looking to soon put it up on CodePlex.

As of now the log can be exported to only CSV format and there is no threading, so don’t freak out when the app starts hanging. I’ll be refactoring the code and adding more export options once I get the time…

Get the application from here:
http://www.projectdistributor.net/Projects/Project.aspx?projectId=259