Friday, November 20, 2009

Trying to use an SPWeb object that has been closed or disposed and is no longer valid.

If your using share point object model and your getting this error -


"Trying to use an SPWeb object that has been closed or disposed and is no longer valid."
The best practice is to dispose objects either by calling Dispose() in finally block or with using clause.


following is the code snippet causing the problem -

using (SPSite site = SPContext.Current.Site)
{
site.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;
using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
{
web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;
SPList list = web.Lists["UserProfileInfo"];
SPListItem Item;
if(string.IsNullOrEmpty(hdnListID.Value))
Item = list.Items.Add();
else
Item =list.Items.GetItemById(Convert.ToInt32(hdnListID.Value));


Item["Initial"] = ddlInitial.SelectedIndex;
Item["FirstName"] = txtFN.Text;
Item["LastName"] = txtLN.Text;
.
.
.
.
.
.
web.Dispose();
}
site.Dispose();
}


The object is not created in the memory when you are using "using". You will find more details about the Best Practices: Using Disposable Windows SharePoint Services Objects HERE

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Debugging the inline code of custom layout pages in SharePoint

I was trying to debug the application page I have design which contains inline code in it. I tried to attach the process to w3wp.exe process but any way the break point get couldn't catch the event.

Now, If you want to debug inline code for application pages in layout folder, Please follow the below steps:


Open the physical folder of that particular SharePoint web application. By default it will be in the following location C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\
  1. Open the web.config file from that folder and make debug="true" in the compilation tag.[<compilation batch="false" debug="true">]
  2. Now open the mycustom.aspx page in VS.NET IDE and in browser using the appropriate SharePoint site URL [http:///_layouts/mycustom.aspx]
  3. Attach the w3wp processor to the debugger and refresh the page in browser – now you can debug the inline code by puting a breakpoint.

I found on very cool article HERE.

 

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Create The Structure

  • You can also use the share point solution generator to create the site definition of your site and then add

  • Start Visual Studio and choose a new WSPBuilder project.

  • Create a folder structure for the solution that matches the folder structure for the SharePoint 12 hive (this is really important – WSPBuilder works on the premise that the Visual Studio solution matches the structure of the SharePoint 12 hive). For now we are just going to create the following folders:
    • Template – subfolder under 12 that holds the other subfolders
    • 1033 – holds the xml files that will tell SharePoint about our new site definitions
    • Features – holds the new features we are going to build (i.e.: lists, webparts, master pages, etc…)
    • Layouts – holds our reference files (i.e.: images, css, js, etc…)
    • Site Templates – holds our site definitions

Create a Site Definition

  • Create a new site definition based off the team site definition in SharePoint.
  • Copy the team site definition folder from the 12 hive:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates\sts

    • Paste the folder in the Visual Studio solutions SiteTemplates folder.
    • Rename the sts folder to something unique (DemoCompanySiteDef for this example)
    • Delete the defaultdws.aspx file because we aren’t going to use it for this example.

    • Open the default.aspx file and change the master page to a new master page. Call this custom.master (yes, I know that this is not the name of our master page. We are going to configure SharePoint to do a string replacement of custom.master with DemoCompany.master in later steps). We will create this master page in the next step.

<%@ Page language=”C#” MasterPageFile=”~masterurl/custom.master”

Modify the Onet.xml file of the Site Definition for initial preparation

  • Open the Onet.xml file (located in the xml folder) and clean it up for our simple site definition.

The Onet.xml file is the file that tells SharePoint how to create the site definition. Whenever you create a new site in SharePoint it reads from the Onet.xml file to determine how to create the site. It is important to note that SharePoint is reading from the Onet.xml file when the site is being created. So, if you already have created a site, you can’t go back to the Onet.xml file, make changes, and expect it to show up on your already created sites.

  • Scroll down to the Configurations XML nodes and remove 2 configurations:
    • ID=1 – Blank
    • ID-2 – DWS

Be very careful not to remove ID=0 – Default, because this is the configuration we are going to use for this site definition. When removing the other two get rid of the whole xml tag as well as everything within their xml tag.

  • Scroll down to the Modules XML nodes and remove 2 modules:
    • DefaultBlank
    • DWS

Once again, be very careful not to remove the Default module because this is the module we are going to use for this site definition. When removing the other two get rid of the whole xml tag as well as everything within their xml tag.

Create the new master page feature

The master page will be created as a feature. The reason for this is that if the master page is in a feature the master page can be added to the master page gallery of SharePoint. This allows you to set out-of-the-box pages to the master page or your own custom site definitions. It also allows you to turn on or turn off the master page features on specific sites. Basically, having it in a feature (rather than directly in the site definition or in the layouts folder) gives you much more flexibility.

  • Create a new folder under “FEATURES” and call it something unique for your master page. For this example we will call it DemoCompanyMasterPage.
  • Create a folder under the DemoCompanyMasterPage called “MasterPages”.
    • Copy the general SharePoint master page from the 12 hive: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\GLOBAL\default.master
    • Paste the file under the “MasterPages” folder in the Visual Studio solution.
    • Rename the file to something unique (DemoCompany.master for this example).
  • Create two xml files under the DemoCompanyMasterPage folder.
    • feature.xml – this will give a unique GUID to the feature (which we will reference later). This file also gives some important information about the Scope of the feature. Lastly, this file tells SharePoint where all the other files that make up this feature lives. This file must be called feature.xml (this is because SharePoint will read all files called feature.xml from the Features folder).

Please note that the Scope=”Site”. This is very important. This is telling SharePoint that this feature is for the site collection. If that Scope=”Web” then it would be telling SharePoint that this feature is for an individual site.

  • elements.xml – this file is telling SharePoint to place the new master page into the master page gallery. This file does not have to be called elements.xml (unlike the feature file which has to be called feature.xml). It just has to match the name located in the “ElementManifest” of the feature.xml file.





Modify Onet.xml file of the Site Definition

We are modifying the Onet.xml file of the Site Definition in order to tell this Site Definition to activate our Master Page feature when the site is created and to use our custom master page with the dynamic url replacement technique.

Dynamic Token URL replacement

To learn more about Dynamic URL replacement please refer to the second article in this series: Examining the out of the box SharePoint Master Pages.

  • Open the onet.xml file in Visual Studio (located at SiteTemplates/DemoCompanySiteDef/xml).
  • Find the xml node that says Configuration ID=0 Name=”Default”.
  • Add in a reference for the new master page:

Note: SharePoint will do a string replacement of any aspx page with ~masterurl/custom.master with the reference in CustomMasterUrl. And, it will replace any aspx page with ~masterurl/default.master with the reference in MasterUrl.

Activate the Feature

  • Find the SiteFeatures XML node.
  • Add a new Feature node in there that matches the GUID of the feature.xml file we created for our master page.

This section of the onet.xml tells the site to activate this particular feature on this particular site when it is being created. The reason it goes into the SiteFeatures (instead of the WebFeatures) is because this particular feature was scoped for a Site Collection. If the feature was scoped for an individual site then it would go in the WebFeatures.

Create the WebTemp*.xml file

WebTemp*.xml files tell SharePoint about site definitions. When a new site is being created in SharePoint the “Select Templates” list box is populated by anything it can find in the WebTemp*.xml files. There can be multiple of these files in SharePoint as long as they are in the 12/Template/1033/XML folder. SharePoint will basically read this folder for any file that starts with the word WebTemp.

  • Add a new folder under 12/Template/1033 in our Visual Studio solution called XML.
  • Add a new file to the 12/Template/1033/XML folder in our Visual Studio solution. This file must start with WebTemp. We will call this file WebTempDemoCompany.xml.

  • Add in the proper xml to tell SharePoint about our new site definition



A few things to note:

  • The “Name” must match the site definition folder exactly. We used the name DemoCompanySiteDef. This matches our site definition name exactly.
  • The Configuration ID must match the configuration ID in our onet.xml file of our Site Definition. We used configuration id 0.
  • The display category will create a new tab on the new site screen in SharePoint.
  • The ID has to be unique and SharePoint has already reserved certain IDs. To be safe use an ID over 10000 and make sure it is unique.

Use WSP Builder to build and deploy the solution

Now, at this point (in a regular SharePoint solution) we would create manifest.xml and ddf files. These are files SharePoint needs to install the solution properly. However, since we are using WSPBuilder, it will do that for us.

  • Right click the project and click WSPBuilder – Build

  • Verify your Web Application is created on your local SharePoint environment. Note: the Site Collection should not be created at this point, just the Web Application. And, you only need to do this once.
  • If the build is successful, right click the project and click WSPBuilder – Deploy.

This is needed because the build command in WSPBuilder just builds a wsp file. This file can be sent to other machines and you can use stsadm scripts to install it on other SharePoint farms. However, in development, we need a quick way to deploy it to the current SharePoint farm. The WSPBuilder – Deploy command will deploy the wsp file on all the Web Applications in the local SharePoint farm.

Use the Site Definition

Open up SharePoint Central Administration and create a new Site Collection with the site definition we just created.

Now you can go back and modify the master page or default.aspx page as you wish. Just be careful not to mess with the ContentPlaceHolders too much. SharePoint reserve these for certain actions on some of its internal pages. After every change you make you can rebuild by clicking WSPBuilder – Build and update the solution by clicking WSPBuilder – Deploy. Then you can just go to the website and see your changes. Just be aware that everytime you deploy WSPBuilder does an app pool recycle (to ensure the changes get pushed out through IIS), so you might have to wait a few seconds to see your changes (during that few seconds the site could say Service Unavailable).

It is also important to note that the first time you deploy with WSPBuilder it does a true SharePoint install. However, every subsequent time it does a SharePoint solution update. Solution updates work for most changes, however, there are some things it can’t do. So, if you run into errors it is sometimes good to do WSPBuilder – Uninstall and then WSPBuilder-Deploy to do a real install in certain situations when you are making changes.

If you are curious to what a SharePoint solution is doing, then just check out the files in the 12 hive:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12

You will notice that all the files we created in our Visual Studio solution have been “pushed” down to the folders in the 12 hive. The WSP knows to “push” these files there. The WSP also knows to tell SharePoint that these files exist. This is exactly how SharePoint develops it’s out of the box site definitions.

Side Notes:

1. Any file you place in the Layouts folder can be reference in the aspx pages as “/_layouts/{filename}”. I usually recommend placing another folder under Layouts in the Visual Studio solution (just because it makes it easy to find later – you can call this folder the name of your company or the name of your project or anything that is obvious that it contains your custom reference files). Then you can reference everything in there by “/_layouts/{folder}/{filename}”. An example of this is css files in the master page. This is possible because SharePoint sets an IIS path up to the Layouts folder in the 12 hive and calls it _layouts.

2. If you want to create a custom webpart with WSPBuilder just click Add – new item… WSPBuilder – WebPartFeature. This will create the feature folder, for your webpart, and the .cs class for your webpart. This way you can go directly into coding and not have to worry about the Feature creation. Once you are done coding the webpart just make sure it is in the appropriate scope of your onet.xml file (SiteFeatures or WebFeatures) and it will become available to you in your webpart gallery. Then all you have to do is worry about your dll being installed in the Bin or GAC. If you choose GAC I recommend post-build scripts to move it.

3. Do not remove Content Place Holders from your master page if you start doing customizations. The reason for this is if you assign other files in SharePoint (such as list pages) to use your master pages, they will assume certain Content Place Holders exist. If they are not there, your site will just break.

SharePoint Site Definitions: Why You Need Them and How to Use Them

The site definition process in SharePoint is complex, but very flexible. Techniques such as "ghosting" can save you a lot of server space and beef up performance. But you need to understand when and how to use site definitions in order to avoid unintended consequences down the line. harePoint makes developing templates easy. You simply create a site the way that you want it and then save it as a template, quickly and easily freezing the site setup into a reusable stamp that you can then use to create other sites. However, user templates in SharePoint can lead to performance problems and may not be the best approach if you're trying to create a set of reusable templates for an entire organization. Instead, you should use site definitions to create templates that form the basis for creating new sites. The site definitions approach doesn't suffer from the same limitations as user templates.

Understanding Ghosting and Unghosting
Before diving into site definitions it's important to understand one of the inner workings of SharePoint. When you create a new site, SharePoint doesn't really copy the pages for that site— default.aspx and so on—into a new database table or directory. These files exist once and only once on each of the front end Web servers. Instead, SharePoint creates a reference to those files in the database tables that define the new site, a process called "ghosting." The outcome is that the site appears to have its own unique pages, but the pages are actually shared across all sites that use the same definition.

This has two distinct advantages over copying the files to each site individually when the site is created. First, it saves space. If you have a thousand sites, rather than having a thousand copies of a file you still have only one. Second, it improves performance. Instead of having to load and cache a thousand pages from the database, the server needs to cache only one copy from the file system, which can improve performance by freeing cache memory for other purposes. Loading the file from the Web server's local file system improves performance by eliminating the overhead of the database call and the network traffic to the database.

One interesting benefit of this approach is that when you make a change to one file on the file system, that change takes effect across all the sites that have been created. All in all, the process of ghosting is a huge benefit to SharePoint. However, there are some limitations.

SharePoint can't ghost every page. Some operations, such as editing a page in FrontPage, cause SharePoint to "unghost" dependent pages for the site. Because ghosting requires all ghosted pages to be exactly the same across all the sites that share them, SharePoint unghosts, or creates a copy of the page in the database, whenever a ghosted page changes, for example, when someone performs an edit operation on the page. Unghosting lets users customize their own sites without impacting other users who might be using the same file. Unfortunately however, unghosting also has a negative performance impact, and makes global changes, such as applying corporate branding to the entire collection of sites far more difficult. Unghosting is the primary reason why efforts to leverage the power of site definitions to change the branding of an entire site may not work as intended.

Exploring Site Definitions
Site definitions are the foundation on which all sites and user templates are built. They consist of a set of files found in the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\TEMPLATE directory. For English sites you'll find the templates under the 1033 directory. This is the first evidence of a multi-lingual design for SharePoint. The 1033 number in the directory name corresponds to the US English locale ID.

Underneath this directory you'll find at least three sub-directories: XML, STS, and MPS. Except for the XML directory, each directory represents a different site definition. SharePoint stores all the files that make up the site definition in the STS and MPS directories. The XML directory contains one or more files that match the filename pattern WEBTEMP*.XML. These files list the site definitions. For example, the base WEBTEMP.XML file lists both the STS and MPS site definitions. If you install SharePoint Portal server you'll also have a WEBTEMPSPS.XML file, which contains all the site definitions for SharePoint Portal Server.

Each WEBTEMP*.XML file has a simple format that starts with a Templates tag containing a nested set of child Template tags. Each Template tag contains a set of Configuration tags. This structure lets you specify new site definitions, each of which can have an initial configuration. The template defines the look and feel while the configuration defines the initial configuration of lists and Web Parts. This becomes obvious when you view the WEBTEMP.XML file shown in Listing 1.

In the WEBTEMP.XML file in Listing 1, the Team Site, Blank Site, and Document Workspace sites all share the STS site definition, but the configuration referenced for each is different. The Configuration ID refers to a set of instructions in the ONET.XML file which, along with several other files and folders, compose a site definition.




Dissecting an Individual Site Definition
Site definitions consist of a hierarchy of files and folders that contain some specific entries. Each template requires three directories: DOCTEMP, LISTS, and XML. The XML folder contains the ONET.XML file, which is essential for creating the corresponding site. Although its contents are a bit messy, ONET.XML contains all the major settings that you need for controlling initial site creation. The XML folder also contains a STDVIEW.XML and VWSTYLES.XML, which control the most basic list display control and allow you to adapt list appearance to meet your needs. You can see these basic display types in the list of options displayed when creating a new View—standard, datasheet, and calendar view base types. Additionally, the styles section of the view settings displays the different ways that the fields in the list can be displayed together.

In the DOCTEMP folder you'll find the various template documents for the different kinds of files referred to by the ONET.XML file in the tag. These are the templates that SharePoint uses when you click the New Document button in a document library.

The LISTS folder contains a set of subfolders that correspond to the tags in the ONET.XML file. Each of these folders contains a SCHEMA.XML file that defines the fields, views, and general information about the appearance of the list within the site. The SCHEMA.XML fills essentially the same role as the ONET.XML file except that it operates within the scope of a list rather than a site.

Throughout the folder structure you'll find .aspx files. These are the Web Part pages that SharePoint uses to display your sites. Changes made to these files affect all the sites that still have that page ghosted. In essence a change to one of the .aspx files in the site definition directory can take effect across the entire set of sites created from the definition.

Dissecting the ONET.XML File
Because the ONET.XML file is a core file that tells SharePoint how to configure a newly created site, it's somewhat complicated; however, the major sections in the file are relatively straightforward after you examine them in a logical progression:

  • Configurations maps the configurations referred to in the WEBTEMP*.XML file in the XML directory off of the locale ID folder. The configuration section tells SharePoint what things to include in a configuration including lists (ListTemplates), Web Parts, and Web Part pages (Modules).
  • ListTemplates creates the templates for lists to be used by the configurations. It leverages the BaseTypes section to control the basic fields and other detail information, and describes global settings for the list, including its ID, descriptive text, and an image.
  • BaseTypes defines the fields and views for a created list. The ListTemplates section uses the BaseTypes section to create a completely formed list.
  • DocumentTemplates provide users with a list of document templates from which they can select the default document template for a Document Library when creating a document library list.
  • Modules describes the files to be added to the SharePoint site and how those files should be configured. In SharePoint every Web Part page is a file. Because of this the modules section describes what Web Parts to display on a file. It also controls the appearance of the navigation bar on those pages.
  • NavBars describes how the navigation bar should look. The navigation bar is the area at the top of the page that typically displays home, documents, lists, etc. This section controls the appearance of the navigation bar for all sites derived from this site definition.
While a detailed exploration of the ONET.XML file is beyond the scope of the article, here's a typical customization sequence so you can see how the process works and some of the places where the file can be modified.




Installing Your Own Site Definition
The first step in customizing a site definition is to install it into SharePoint. You start this process by copying an existing site definition and placing it into another directory. You can use any of the existing site definitions as your starting point. For demonstration purposes, copy the STS site definition folder structure to a new DEVX folder. Doing that gives you a new site definition based on the contents of the DEVX directory.

Next, connect the DEVX site definition to SharePoint by copying the WEBTEMP.XML file located in the TEMPLATE\\XML directory to a file named WEBTEMPDEVX.XML. Open the file and delete any unnecessary tags. For this example, remove the tag whose Name attribute value is "MPS." Change the Name attribute of the remaining tag from STS to DEVX, and change the ID attribute of the tag so that it is unique—generally numbers above 10000 will be safe. Finally, modify each of the Title attributes of the configuration tags so that you can easily determine which site definitions the file contains. The resulting WEBTEMPDEVX.XML file should look something like Listing 2.

The final step is to perform an IIS reset so that SharePoint "sees" the new site definition. After restarting IIS you can create a new site and see your new site definitions. Note that your new site will look exactly like an out-of-the-box Windows SharePoint Services site.

Customizing Your Site Definition
Now that you have your own site definition to work from you can customize it to meet your needs. Most people make two basic customizations. First, they customize the ONET.XML file to control how SharePoint creates new sites. Second, they change the .aspx pages to reflect other visual changes. You can make these latter changes at any time, but changes to the ONET.XML file affect only the creation of new sites, and are therefore of limited use after you've already created many sites.

Customizing ONET.XML
One of the most difficult customizations for most people seems to be adding a Web Part to a page. Earlier, I mentioned that the Configurations section of the ONET.XML file matches the configuration options in the WEBTEMP*.XML file. The ONET.XML contains a section for configuration 0—the default. This section creates several lists and then performs the actions listed in two modules. The first module, named Default, adds the default.aspx page. The second adds some Web Parts to the Web Part library—for this customization, you can ignore the second module.


Figure 1. The DEVX Default Template: This shows how a new site built on the modified DEVX Default template looks when you browse to its default.aspx page.
The Default module appears below the configuration section in the modules section and includes the appropriate reference for default.aspx as well as the lists to add to that file (page). The process of adding a new list view Web Part to the page is as simple as adding a new View tag. The List attribute in the View tag must match the ID tag from the tag in the tag from above. You should set the Web Part order so that the Web Part appears in the correct location relative to the other Web Parts in the Web Part zone that you specify. So, to add a new Web Part on the page that displays the task list, the View tag would look like this:
The 107 used in the List attribute matches the Tasks List item from the configuration. A quick IIS reset and you can create a new site based on your revised settings. If you made the changes above and created a new DEVX team site, the tasks list would appear on the default.aspx page under the events as shown in Figure 1.




Customizing the default.aspx File
Customizing default.aspx is in some ways even simpler than customizing the ONET.XML file. You can simply use Notepad to make the changes to the HTML and ASP.NET tags that you want in the file. You can also use FrontPage and edit one of the sites created from the site definition—as long as you select Save As from the file menu when you save the file and save it to another place on your machine and then copy the saved file to the site definition directory manually. This process lets you edit the file visually with FrontPage without disturbing the ghosting process that SharePoint uses.

For example, one quick and easy modification to default.aspx is to change the image that appears above the Quick Launch bar. To change the image, open default.aspx from the site definition in Notepad and search for onetidtpweb1, which is the ID of the image tag in the file (there's nothing special about searching for the tag by ID, it just helps to expedite finding the right spot in the file). In this tag replace home.gif with the name of the replacement image file that you want to use, and change the height and width attributes to match the height and width of your new image. Save the file.

The last step in making the customization is to place the image in the TEMPLATE\IMAGES directory underneath the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60 directory where all the other SharePoint files reside.

This time, you can see the effect of your changes without resetting IIS; sites created with your new template will reflect the new graphic.

User Templates
Because of the effort that's involved in creating site definitions it's easy to get frustrated and decide to move back to just doing user templates. But then you have to deal with the unghosting and maintenance headaches of managing multiple user templates mentioned at the start of this article. Worse, there's a potentially more important concern if you're going to be managing a large environment.

Sites created with user templates do not maintain any record of the user template used to create them. However, all sites do record which site definition was used to create them. This can become important when you're trying to write utilities that manage large numbers of sites, because there's no way to determine which user template was used to create the site. If you have several well-defined types of sites on your server it may become impossible to write utilities to work on just those sites directly.

User templates are good for prototyping and for smaller SharePoint deployments where the configuration management issues relating to their tendency to allow ghosting and their inability to leave their mark on the sites that are created from them. However, larger environments would be wise to limit the use of user templates where possible.

The site definition process in SharePoint is extremely flexible, however, with that flexibility comes complexity. Site definitions consist of many interrelated files and directories, but after you understand their purposes it's easy to put all the pieces together.

Despite the complexity challenges with site definitions it's important to not slip into the trap of relying on user templates for larger deployments; otherwise, managing sites en mass becomes far more difficult than necessary.

Friday, October 2, 2009

XSLT Web Part Connections


Start out with both web parts in SharePoint designer

Convert both to XSLT Data View. (Right Click on the web part)

Get rid of the extra items in each web part
(Click on DataView Properties to remove the tool bar):

Uncheck SharePoint List Toolbar

Remove the Description field and the from the Right Web Part by Deleting the item in the cells:

becomes

Rearrange the cells in the Left Web Part:

Remove the hyperlink from the Title field in both web parts. Click on a title and the format menu appears:

Choose Format as Text

To set up the web part connect, click on the arrow in top right of the Right Web Part and choose Web Part Connections. Choose Send Row of Data To and click Next

Connect to a Web Part on this page and click Next

Target Web Part – Left Web Part
Target action – Get Filter Values (click Next)

Look for the Title field in the Right column, clink in the corresponding column on the left and choose Title, then click Next

Choose Title in the Create a hyperlink on field (click Next)

Click Finished