Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog

Understanding workflow starting parameters - Part 1

spdblog — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:18:00 GMT

Hello all, I’m Chong Youn (John) Choe, a PM on the SharePoint Designer team. SharePoint Designer is a handy tool and is designed to embrace those who are not developers. I will be creating a series of posts about fundamental features that can help you become confident in using SharePoint Designer. What’s even better is that these features are enough for you to create powerful workflows!

I’m going to begin with the starting parameters. A couple of posts will be created on this topic, the concept behind and understanding how to gather user input will be explained in this post. How to extract the values and manipulate them will be demonstrated in the next post.

Let’s get to the point then.

What are these for?

Certain type of data cannot be determined when you are designing a workflow. For example, the amount of money in an expense report or the target date in a vacation request are examples of data that cannot be determined while creating a workflow. As such, we should design starting parameters to receive such data when needed.

When does a workflow receive user input? (What is initiation and association?)

Assume a paper-based working circumstance. The amount of money or a target date could be written when an employee hands in the expense report sheets or vacation request sheets. This is an example of information being filled up at the moment the workflow starts.

Imagine a basic format of a sheet used in a company, and its variations are used in different parts of the company. In our example company, sheets submitted to the CEO have to be one-page, and the marketing department has made a rule to review any approval requests within 3 days. In SharePoint, this is comparable to setting different values when a workflow is applied to a list. This way, items can share common values within the list but not outside the list even though the workflow can be associated with any list in a site.

All SharePoint Designer created workflows will display initiation forms to users for setting parameters when the workflow initiates, which is why it is named ‘initiation parameter’. Reusable workflows provide one additional starting form and parameter when it is associated with a list, which is called the ‘association parameter’. The parameters can be displayed at the association time and the initiation time, these parameters at initiation time show values preset at the association time even though they are editable.

For now, let’s say that list workflows and site workflows have only initiation parameters, while reusable workflows have initiation parameters, association parameters, and parameters included at both times.

In case you are confused what initiation and association are, here are some brief examples.

When you click on an item in a list,

Edit item view pops up, the “Workflows” button is selectable there

Then another layer pops up with the workflow information that is controllable for the chosen item. When you choose a workflow to start, the form that comes up next is the initiation form. This is a list workflow or associated reusable workflow example, however the forms of site workflow or globally reusable workflows are also initiation forms.

On the contrary, association forms however, face users only when a reusable workflow is being associated.

Choosing “Add a Workflow” as shown above from a list,

Here, you are able to see the workflow association page. Select a workflow template and give each field an appropriate value, and click OK. The association form will then show up.

Note that initiation forms and association forms are not easily distinguishable by their looks!

“Introduction to designing and customizing workflows” describes workflow types and when to use them.

How to set parameters in order to receive user input

First step for setting input parameters is to find the “Initiation Form Parameters” button in the “Variables” section in the ribbon. Pressing it will pop up an “Association and Initiation Form Parameters” dialog.

Click on the “Add” button to insert a new parameter in “Add Field” dialog. The other buttons will be covered below.

As you can see, there are 4 fields which can be filled, “Field name”, “Description”, “Information type” and “Collect from parameter during”.

Field name and description will be displayed as strings to users and have no impact functionally, where any texts can be inserted. I recommend you to fill in the fields with descriptive expressions.

Information type is a predefined set of data types that are part of the initiation and association data. The value here can be:

· Single line of text

· Multiple lines of text

· Number (1, 1.0, 100)

· Date and Time

· Choice (menu to choose from)

· Yes/No (check box)

· Person or Group

· Hyperlink or Picture

· Assignment Stages

Last but not least, the last field asks when its data should be set. The value here can be “Initiation (starting the workflow)”, “Association (attaching to a list)” or both. This field does not exist on the dialog opened from a List, Site, or Globally Reusable workflow since its data can only be set during initiation.

You can set the initial value for this field or leave it blank on the next page and complete this section.

What happens if you add one initiation parameter as shown above?

A new field has just emerged. There are 3 values for “Show on Form”, these values are “Initiation”, “Association”, and “Both”. These options pertain to what is chosen in the “collect from parameter during” field. You can add another parameter by the “Add” button. Selecting a field will enable the “Modify” and the “Remove” buttons. The “Modify” button will open the “Modify Field” dialog which is exactly the same as the “Add Field” dialog but with the values preset to what you initially added. The “Remove” button will erase the field selected. When there are at least two or more fields in the dialog and if you select a field the “Move” buttons will become enabled and let you adjust the order of the fields. Changing the order here will directly make the same changes in the starting forms which are automatically built and also modifiable.

“Workflow Association and Initiation Forms (SharePoint Foundation)” gives you technical information with regard to forms.

This is the default form made by SharePoint Designer, which is displayable and modifiable by InfoPath. You can also take it as a preview of what users will see during the workflow instance initiation.

As you can see, the field name and the description are explicitly displayed in the default form. “Start” and “Cancel” buttons are used to confirm and call off an initiation of the given workflow instance, respectively.

Details on every field type

Listed here are all the possible starting parameter type instances in a page. Currently 10 types are supported as the starting parameter although there are more variable types in SharePoint Designer.

Each type can have a default value, description, and other restrictions such as valid input range. Moreover, the automated initial form is customizable with InfoPath with which you can modify the text, image and layout.

1) Single line of text

The “Single line of text” is a field to receive one line of string. Default value can be set from the dialog above, which will be displayed in a line. Although the character limit for this field is quite long, I recommend you to use “Multiple lines of text” field instead of this if the string cannot fit on one line.

2) Multiple lines of text

This is for receiving long strings. The “Single line of text” and the “Multiple lines of text” are visually different, but treated as the same SharePoint Designer string variable type.

3) Number

The “Number” field is able to receive a number as a ‘double’ type. This means that not only can integers and positive number be accepted, but fractional values and negative values can also be injected. A default value can be set or left blank. You can also set minimum or maximum values for this field to prevent users from entering numbers that are too small or too large.

4) Date and Time

The “Date and Time” type has few options to aid you in setting appropriate values. First of all, you can choose the value type between “Date only” and “Date and Time”. If “Date only” is chosen here, only date values will be displayed and modifiable on the form, while both date and time will be available for “Date and Time”.

The very bottom check box option restricts user input values to be no earlier than the moment the form is opened. This is beneficial in many real scenarios to avoid mistakes. For instance, when it comes to setting approval deadlines or vacation dates, usually the date and time have to be a date or time in the future.

Of course, initial values can also be set for data and time to guide users. Today’s date and current time are also given as options.

5) Choice

The “Choice” type allows you to use dropdown menus. Each choice has to be written as a line of text, and a default value can be set or left empty.

For the text-based designer’s sake, it provides an option to separate the text displayed on the form and the string value being used during design time within SharePoint Designer text-based designer. If a vertical bar is inserted into a line, the left string will become the value within the text-based designer, while the other side will be shown during the initiation and association.

6) Yes/No

This provides a check box to users when the workflow starts. The only thing to set is the default value.

7) Person or Group

The “Show Field” option can be ignored for now, since every time a user or group is selected, the user or group will always be shown via their display name. Not allowing blank values can force users to select at least one person or group to complete the given form and proceed.

You can decide whether to allow groups to be selected or not. It is also possible to limit which SharePoint Groups can be used to pick a person or group. Choosing “All Users” will allow users to pick from all accessible sources.

“People and Groups” should be selected and “Allow multiple values” must be checked in order to receive the user input above.

8) Hyperlink

You can decide if you would like the URL to be displayed as a “Hyperlink” or a static “Picture”.

This option will inject a button and a text based hyperlink into the target form. After clicking on this option, users will need to specify the URL and its description. For example, if you put “http://microsoft.com” and “Microsoft” respectively, this part of the form will become as below.

The link is already set to link to http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx. The user can still modify the link by clicking on the button on the left side.

9) Picture

You can decide if you would like the URL to be displayed as a “Hyperlink” or a static “Picture”.

A picture can be set with a URL and a description just the same as a hyperlink. This will inserts the target picture into the form right away, which can be replaced by clicking on it and writing another URL. The description is shown when the cursor is hovered above the picture. The picture above shows an example of this where the “SPD blog” text is the description.

10) Assignment Stages

The “Assignment Stages” is useful only in the Office Task. Be sure not to take advantage of this parameter without the Office Task.

The “Assignment Stages” is unusual in a couple of aspects. It cannot be referenced from the text-based designer unless it is inherent from an Approval workflow, and it can expand stages dynamically. Each stage is a combination of the people picker and an assignment order type, either serial or parallel.

The concept of the “Assignment Stages” is a very complicated but powerful component which I won’t be able to fully explain in this one post. But I plan on making another blog post just on the Office Task soon, in which I will be able to talk further about this concept.

Summary

The starting parameters are used for receiving user input to workflows. There are two type of starting parameters, the initiation parameters and the association parameters. You can set ten types of starting parameters according to the scenario you are you using your workflows for. Each type of parameters has useful options to guide end users.

If you wish to know more about making and using the initiation parameters, “Create a workflow initiation form” office support document has a decent explanation. But please note that the document is for SharePoint Designer 2007 and is hence outdated.

In part 2, I will depict how to use the parameters received at designing workflows.

Thank you everyone for taking the time to read this blog posting. I hope it was helpful to you.

Please feel free to leave comments below.

Regards,

Chong Youn (John) Choe

Creating a SharePoint 2010 Workflow using SPD 2010 and Visio 2010: How-To & FAQ

spdblog — Thu, 19 May 2011 02:32:20 GMT

Hello all, my name is Sam Chung and I’m a PM on the SharePoint Designer team. In this blog I’m going to talk about how you can use Visio 2010 and SPD 2010 together to create workflows. In addition, I’m going to touch base on some common issues and questions people run into when using the two tools together.

To set the stage we need some context regarding the relationship between SPD and Visio. There are already a number of resources out there regarding how you can use the two together. In particular the follow blog entries describe this from Visio’s side:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visio/archive/2009/11/23/sharepoint-workflow-authoring-in-visio-premium-2010-part-1.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visio/archive/2010/01/19/sharepoint-workflow-authoring-in-visio-premium-2010-part-2.aspx#comments

However, as the above blog posts are quite dated, I’ve decided to bring a fresher relook at using the two together. In addition, I will be diving a bit deeper into some areas, and going over some common issues people have already been hitting.

Background

For this blog I’m going to assume you haven’t seen any previous information relating Visio and SPD, and as such, I’m going to set some background. If you’re already fairly familiar Visio and SPD I’d suggest you skip this section and move onto the next sections.

The SharePoint Designer 2010 team has partnered with Visio to allow users the ability to use the two tools together in creating and viewing workflows. This blog will focus more on the creation piece of the partnership and will not touch too much on the server side visualization (let’s leave some stuff for another blog).

The creation of a workflow can now happen in two ways. Users can use the regular sentence based designer within SPD to create/edit workflows, or they can use Visio client. Since the creation of workflows within the Sentence based designer is something that is fairly well known, I’m going to concentrate on how users can use Visio Client to create and edit workflows.

**NOTE** You need to have Visio 2010 Premium to be able to do this. In addition, SPD 2010 and Visio 2010 must be installed together on the same machine

This partnership was created to help those who are more comfortable with Visio to be able to use a more familiar design surface. At the same time, the Visio design surface offers a very unique view of the workflow that many users may find useful when designing/reviewing workflows. Although the entire workflow cannot be created in Visio, users are still able to create the overall “flow” of the workflow and then finish setting the parameters within SPD.

Creating a Workflow Diagram in Visio

1. Start Visio 2010 Premium

2. Create a new Diagram

3. Under Template Categories, select “Flowchart”.

4. Then select Microsoft SharePoint Workflow

5. Press the Create button found on the right side.

***Note*** There is no difference between selecting US Units or Metric Units. Both will create the same workflow diagram.

6. You will be presented with a blank canvas. Before you start, you should know that you need to insert the Start Shape and End Shape.

· All SharePoint workflows need to have these shapes.

· All of the workflow shapes you add need to be inserted between these two shapes.

7. All of the workflow shapes have been organized into categories within the stencil pane.

· Quick Shapes – contain the shapes that are placed in the “top portion” within each of the different categories.

***Note*** Quick shapes are a great way of speeding up the workflow creation process. Every category within the stencil has a quick shapes section. For example, if you look the SharePoint Workflow Actions category, you’ll see how there’s a thin line separating the top set of actions from the bottom set of actions.

The actions located at the top are the “Quick Shapes” for that category. Quick Shapes are not automatically selected based off usage or anything like that. Instead, the shapes in this section are simply user settable. Go ahead and click and drag any shape you want above the line and that shape will become part of the quick shapes list. You can then use these shapes to help create your diagram a lot quicker. The top four quick shapes will appear as ghosted option on shapes within the canvas. (Simply mouse over the light blue arrow heads on the side of any shape to see this)

· SharePoint Workflow Actions (XXX units) – is where all of the SharePoint Workflow actions are stored

· SharePoint Workflow Conditions (XXX units) – is where all of the SharePoint Workflow conditions are stored

· SharePoint Workflow Terminators (XXX units) – is where you will find the Start and End workflow shapes that I described in step 6

***Note*** The SharePoint Workflow Actions shown in the stencil pane are not filtered based off the type of workflow you would like to create. Normally, when you create a workflow in SPD, the list of actions you are presented with is filtered to just the set of actions that are relevant to the type of workflow you are creating. So if you are creating a List workflow you will only see list workflow actions, this is the same for the site workflows and reusable workflows. However, in Visio client there is no filtering on the list of actions made available to you. As such, when creating workflows using Visio, you will need to make sure that you only use actions that are relevant for the type of workflow you are creating.

In addition, none of the site workflow specific actions are available here. As such, you will not be able to create Site Workflows using Visio Client. During Import you will notice that there is no option to create site workflows based off a Visio Diagram.

8. Go ahead now and add the shapes you’d like and create your workflow. For this blog I have created a very simple example.

***Note*** Don’t forget to set the Yes/No options on all conditional shapes. A quick way to do this is to just right click on any of the connectors coming out of a conditional shape and select “yes” or “no”.

Exporting / Importing between Visio and SPD

By this point you are trying to get your Visio Diagram from Visio to SPD. The next couple sections will cover the best ways to do this.

Going from Visio to SPD

1. Once you have created your diagram and you’re ready to send it to SPD you need to first press the “Export” button

· This button is found in the “Process” tab

2. If there are errors within your diagram they will appear in the error pane.

***Note*** Visio at this point in time is checking to make sure that the diagram you are trying to send to SPD is a diagram that can be converted directly into a workflow. But it is only checking between the start and end shapes. Everywhere else is fair game for you to place whatever Visio shapes you may want. Just make sure that everything between the Start and End shape are workflow shapes, and that they are connected properly.

3. Assuming the validation passed (if it didn’t pass, and you have errors, go fix the error first and then come back) you’ll be presented with an Export Workflow dialog where you can specify where you want the VWI file saved. Select a location, name your file and press Save (I called mine “Simple Workflow” and saved it on the desktop).

***Note*** The VWI you are saving represents an Open XML file, basically a zip file, that contains several other files within it. You can go ahead and use your favorite zip program to unzip the file and take a look at what files exist within it. But generally, you will find the following files:

[content_types].xml

Workflow.vdx

Workflow.xoml

Workflow.xoml.rules

In general, the ones you will care most about are the .vdx file and the .xoml files. The vdx file is the Visio diagram you just created. And the .xoml files represent the actual workflow xoml that would be run once the workflow is published. Right now, the .xoml files won’t have much in them because this workflow hasn’t been properly configured yet in SPD. But once we finish configuring this workflow and if we were to export out the workflow again from SPD you would see a lot more info in the .xoml files. You’d also see a workflow.config file that outlines additional details regarding the workflow. For now, let’s not mess with these files and just move on to the next step.

If you would like to learn more about Open XML files, please refer to the following link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205(v=office.12).aspx

4. Now let’s go ahead and Import in that VWI file into SPD. Open up SPD, and connect to your most favorite SharePoint 2010 site.

5. Next click on the Workflow Link found on the left navigation bar

6. Next go to the ribbon and press the “Import from Visio” button

7. This will bring up the Import Wizard. Go ahead and first select your VWI file, and press the next button

8. Give your workflow a name and select what type of workflow it is.

9. If everything has gone correctly you should see something like below:

Modifying the Workflow

1. You can now go ahead and start setting the parameters for each of the actions within the workflow. Once you’re done, your workflow might look something like below:

2. Now before you publish, let’s add another action to the workflow. I inserted a simple log to history action to the end of my workflow.

***Note*** Now this is a really important note. If you’re going to be adding/deleting/moving actions within your workflow, there is a very good chance that the diagram you initially started out will NOT look the same when you view it in the server side visualization. This is because when you modify action locations within SPD, the Visio Add-on inside of SPD needs to dynamically recreate the diagram and relay out the entire diagram. This means that things might look different from what you would have expected. As such, if the server side visualization is important to you, you should:

a) First Export the workflow from SPD back to Visio

b) Fix the diagram

c) Export out from Visio to SPD

d) Republish the workflow (without modifying it again in SPD)

3. Go ahead now and publish your newly created workflow.

Conclusion

Well there you have it, a quick and tightly integrated experience going from Visio to SPD. Hopefully this has been of some use to you. I’ve gone and consolidated the notes from above into a FAQ / Tips section below.

Please feel free to post questions below. I’ll try and respond to the questions as much as possible.

In addition, hopefully in the next couple weeks I will create another short follow up blog post describing in detail the experience of going from SPD to Visio, along with issues that can arise when trying to update an already existing workflow with a Visio diagram.

Thank you everyone for reading.

Sam

FAQ And Tips & Tricks

1. You need to have Visio 2010 Premium to be able to create SharePoint 2010 workflows. In addition, SPD 2010 and Visio 2010 must be installed together on the same machine

2. When creating a new Visio SharePoint 2010 Workflow Diagram, there is no difference between selecting US Units or Metric Units. Both will create the same workflow diagram.

3. Quick shapes are a great way of speeding up the workflow creation process. Every category within the stencil has a quick shapes section. For example, if you look the SharePoint Workflow Actions category, you’ll see how there’s a thin line separating the top set of actions from the bottom set of actions.

4. The SharePoint Workflow Actions shown in the stencil pane are not filtered based off the type of workflow you would like to create. Normally, when you create a workflow in SPD, the list of actions you are presented with is filtered to just the set of actions that are relevant to the type of workflow you are creating. So if you are creating a List workflow you will only see list workflow actions, this is the same for the site workflows and reusable workflows. However, in Visio client there is no filtering on the list of actions made available to you. As such, when creating workflows using Visio, you will need to make sure that you only use actions that are relevant for the type of workflow you are creating.

5. In addition, none of the site workflow specific actions are available here. As such, you will not be able to create Site Workflows using Visio Client. During Import you will notice that there is no option to create site workflows based off a Visio Diagram.

6. Don’t forget to set the Yes/No options on all conditional shapes. A quick way to do this is to just right click on any of the connectors coming out of conditional shape and select “yes” or “no”.

7. When trying to export out a diagram from Visio, Visio is checking to make sure that the diagram you are trying to send to SPD is a diagram that can be converted directly into a workflow. But it is only checking between the start and end shapes. Everywhere else is fair game for you to place whatever Visio shapes you may want. Just make sure that everything between the Start and End shape are workflow shapes, and that they are connected properly.

8. The VWI you are saving represents an Open XML file, basically a zip file, that contains several other files within it. You can go ahead and use your favorite zip program to unzip the file and take a look at what files exist within it. But generally, you will find the following files:

[content_types].xml

Workflow.vdx

Workflow.xoml

Workflow.xoml.rules

In general, you will care most about the .vdx file and the .xoml files. The vdx file is the Visio diagram you just created. And the .xoml files represent the actual workflow xoml that would be run once the workflow is published. The .xoml files won’t have much in them when exported from a new Visio diagram; this is because this workflow hasn’t been properly configured yet in SPD. But once you finish configuring this workflow and if you were to export out the workflow again from SPD you would see a lot more info in the .xoml files. You’d also see a workflow.config file that outlines additional details regarding the workflow.

If you would like to learn more about Open XML files, please refer to the following link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205(v=office.12).aspx

9. If you’re going to be adding/deleting/moving actions within your workflow, there is a very good chance that the diagram you initially started out will NOT look the same when you view it in the server side visualization. This is because when you modify action locations within SPD, the Visio Add-on inside of SPD needs to dynamically recreate the diagram and relay out the entire diagram. This means that things might look different from what you would have expected. As such, if the server side visualization is important to you, you should:

a) First Export the workflow from SPD back to Visio

b) Fix the diagram

c) Export out from Visio to SPD

d) Republish the workflow (without modifying it again in SPD)

Association Columns

spdblog — Mon, 02 May 2011 02:34:09 GMT

Hello, there. I’m JongHwa Lim, a PM in the SharePoint Designer team. Long time no see. Some people might have considered this site dead because there have been no new posts since April of last year but we are back. We will keep this site alive and will post new blogs at least every month and try to keep connected to readers and customers.

To warm this site up (and also warm my team up for upcoming posts), let’s start with a small but very useful feature new in SharePoint Designer 2010 (aka. SPD).

When do we need association columns

Let’s first start off by setting a scenario. You are a workflow author who is used to using SPD and you are required to make a workflow that should be used in many lists or document libraries with some workflow-specific fields. How do you implement it? Here are some examples of choices you might try to achieve this goal.

· List workflow

o You can start from list workflows. You will add the workflow specific fields to the list directly. And during design time in SharePoint Designer, you can see the fields and create your workflow logic using those fields.

o But when it comes to reusing this workflow in other lists or doc libraries, you don’t have good answer for it.

· Reusable workflow

o You are a little bit more familiar with SPD workflows so you choose to go with reusable workflow which will resolve the reuse issue. But as you open the workflow designer, you end up seeing only ‘Title’ for settable field and seeing ‘Content Type’, ‘Created’, ‘Created By’, ‘ID’, ‘Modified’, ‘Modified By’ and ‘Title’ for readable fields.

o You cannot use the fields you need to make the workflow logic.

· Reusable workflow with base content type

o You are an advanced user of SPD workflow so you know the concept of base content type for reusable workflow.

o First, you create a new content type and add the necessary fields to the content type. And in the ‘Create Reusable Workflow’ dialog, designate the content type you created as the base content type.

o Now you can see the fields in the workflow designer and you can achieve what you are required to do. This has no issue with reuse scenario as long as you associate this workflow with the content type and the content type is added to the list or document library.

o But what if you found out you need a new field? Every time you need a new field, you have to go to site content type or the site column UI either on the server or on SPD.

o Another weakness still exists. When you want to move your workflow using ‘Save as Template’, the unpackaged workflow will lose some information on the base content type if the base content type is a custom content type or the content type contains a custom site column.

· Reusable workflow with association column

o You are almost as familiar with SPD as the one who knows base content type concept. So you know the concept of association column.

o As you start authoring the workflow, when you need a field, you just create it right away with association columns, where you can choose between an existing site column and a new one. You don’t go back-and-forth all the way among workflow designer, site content type, and site column UIs. You can do everything in one place and that’s it.

o In addition, there is no issue with reuse because reusable workflow definitions carry the fields with it and workflow package supports it.

What is Association Column

Now, some of you may have tried to find help files on this topic. Here are some examples of what can be found:

· Reusable workflows, by default, don’t have the context of a specific list or library. Therefore, by default, they provide only the columns that are common across lists and libraries, such as Created and Created By.
If your reusable workflow requires certain columns to be present in the list or library that you associated it to, you can add those columns as association columns. Association columns get added automatically to a list or library when a reusable workflow is associated to that list or library.

· Association columns
If your reusable workflow requires certain columns to be present in the list or library that it is associated to, you can add those columns as association columns. Association columns get added automatically to a list or library when a reusable workflow is associated to that list or library.

· (Tooltip of Ribbon button)
Define columns that will be added to a list when the workflow is associated with that list. This option is unavailable for site workflows.

All these descriptions are completely true and perfectly explain what association columns are and what it is for. Association columns were introduced by because of the real world scenario that there is no good experience for reusable workflow authors when they want to update the fields of the ‘current item’. As we didn’t have a ‘reusable workflow’ concept until SharePoint Designer 2010, we didn’t have association columns, either. Without association columns, the only alternative may have been to use base content type. But, this also put various limitations in terms of association and design time UX because it could only be associated to the base content type or inherited content types and the author should go from workflow designer to site content type or site column UIs several times.

How to create an association column

Creating an association column is straight forward. I will show you with an example. As shown below, you can start with the Ribbon button named ‘Association Columns’.

If you click on it, a warning dialog will pop up like below.

If you select ‘OK’, you will be directed to the main dialog for association column.

You can choose from ‘Select Site Column’ and ‘Add New Column’. If you select site column, the following dialog will be presented.

If you select Address field, it will be added to the main dialog.

If you add new column, following UI will be shown where you can define a new column.

In this example, I’ve created a multi-line text field named ‘Comments from Approvers’.

You can see that when a new column is selected, Modify is also enabled but it will be disabled for any existing columns.

If you click ‘OK’, you are done with the association column. Now you can see ‘Address’ and ‘Comments from Approvers’ in the designer surface.

How it works

Internally, association column is using site column so that’s why you can see option ‘Select Site Column…’ button in the UI. The association columns whether it is newly created or chosen from site columns are persisted in the wfconfig file so that it can be used during design time.

But if you look at the wfconfig before you publish the workflow, you can find the following field definition. This is because we create site columns during publishing time and update the corresponding field definition in the wfconfig.

So if you revisit the association column dialog after publish, you can see the difference that ‘New Column’ changed to ‘Existing Column’ and you are not allowed to modify it.

And when the reusable workflow is associated to the list or document library, we add the association columns to the list and document library so that the reusable workflow referencing the fields work just fine.

Packaging

If you package the reusable workflow and un-package it in another site, the association columns are kept, meaning that association columns are also packaged and unpackaged. On the other hand, custom base content type and custom site column in the base content type are not fully packaged, meaning that there could be information lost during the transfer.

Limit

When we associate a reusable workflow to a content type, the association columns are added to the list or document library when the content type is added to the list or document library. We do not add the association columns directly to the content type.

SharePoint Designer Blog Updates

spdblog — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 06:42:00 GMT

Hello All,

My name is Sam Chung, and I'm a PM on the SharePoint Designer team. I just wanted to let everyone know that we're bringing back to life this blog and that we will be posting new entries in the upcoming weeks. There have been quite a few changes within the SPD team and these changes have made it so that we weren't able to give this blog the attention it needed up until now.

We currently have a list of topic ideas that we're reviewing to see which topic to write about. But if anyone has any blog topics that they'd love to see right away, please feel free to post it in the comments below. We will review the comment topics with our list and prioritize our blog postings accordingly.

Thank you to everyone who has continued to return to this blog hoping for updates. We apologize for the lack of updates but the blog is back now. And there will be updates soon. :)

Sam

SharePoint Designer 2010 RTM

spdblog — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 06:32:00 GMT

It's here! To keep this brief - we're pleased to announce the availability of SharePoint Designer 2010, along with the release of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. Download it now for free using the following links: 32 bit, 64 bit. Enjoy!

Working with the SharePoint Theming Engine

spdblog — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 22:29:00 GMT

Hi, Kolby here again. As we get closer to releasing SharePoint 2010, I’m getting more and more excited about our product and some of the new functionality we’ve added in 2010. I’m particularly looking forward to theming capabilities that the SharePoint team has added this release. Last week I learned how to set up a CSS file for theming a master page in SharePoint Designer 2010, and I thought, “People need to see this!”

What are the theming possibilities?

The theming engine works on CSS files, and can do the following (token name in italics):

Replace colors (such as a background or font color) - ReplaceColor
Replace fonts – ReplaceFont
Recolor images (using one of three methods: tint, blend, and fill)- RecolorImage

Through the browser UI, you can select an out-of-the-box Site Theme or with SharePoint Server (SPS), create a new one by picking 12 colors and 2 fonts. These values are stored in a THMX file, a standard that’s also used by Microsoft Office. You can also build a theme in Microsoft PowerPoint and save it as a THMX file to use in SharePoint. The THMX files are stored in the Theme Gallery in your root site, and you can add themes via SPD or the browser Site Settings > Themes gallery). The twelve theme colors are represented by the tokens:

Dark1, Dark2
Light1, Light2
Accent1, Accent2, Accent3, Accent4, Accent5, Accent6
Hyperlink
Followed Hyperlink

The theming engine works with these colors and produces 5 additional permutations of each: Lightest, Lighter, Medium, Darker, and Darkest. To reference a permutation in the CSS file use the format: Color-Permutation (“Light2-Darkest” for example).

Syntax

The theming engine works by reading comments in your CSS file. For a themed style, define a default choice, and place a theming token directly before the style. Here’s an example: I have a background-color element that I want to be themed to Light2-Darkest. My definition in the CSS would look like this:

/* [ReplaceColor(themeColor:"Light2-Darkest")] */ background-color:#707070;

In the default theme, the background will appear as #707070, but when a theme is applied, the background color will be replaced with Light2-Darkest. For examples of how to use the other tokens, see the end of this article or look at the default CSS file for v4.master (corev4.css), which is a great reference.

File Setup

To set up a master page with theming capability, you must do two things:

Place the CSS file in a location where the engine will see it.
Register the CSS file correctly in the master page.

Location

The theming engine will run on CSS files only if they’re placed in the correct place. For our customizations we’ll use the RootSite/Style Library/~language/Themable folder. This folder will exist for SPS sites with the SharePoint Server Publishing feature activated. If you’re working in a root site without this structure, all you need is a folder named “Style Library” at the root site with a folder named “Themable” inside it. Any content within the Themable folder will be seen by the theming engine (including content within subfolders). Recreate this folder structure in SharePoint Designer or through the browser. The language folder is optional, but if you want different CSS files for different languages, then you will need it. For English, name the folder en-us.

Images do not need to be placed in a specific location, but the suggested place is a RootSite/Style Library/Images folder.

A couple hints about the recoloring images. If you recolor an image that is rendered in multiple locations, the last recoloring performed on the image will be used in all themed locations. For example, I wanted to show different recolor methods on the same image (tinting, blending, and filling), but they all showed up filled. I had to save individual copies of the image and theme them differently (note: a last resort alternative is to use a detach attribute to tell the engine to create a new image when recoloring it, but this method should be used sparingly due to the performance reasons of downloading the multiple image copies during rendering. For that reason I will not go into detail here). For image clusters (a single file that contains more than one image), you can recolor portions of the image using the includeRectangle parameter (look at corev4.css for an example of how to do this).

Registration

For the themed CSS files to be applied to our master page, we need to register the CSS file instead of just linking it. This will point the master page to the themed CSS file when a theme is applied. Place the following parameter in the master page head tag:

<SharePoint:CssRegistration name="<% $SPUrl:~sitecollection/Style Library/~language/ Themable /myStyleSheet.css %>" After="corev4.css" runat="server"/>

The After parameter ensures that our themed CSS file is applied to the page after corev4.css. Do note, however, that the <% $SPUrl token will not resolve in SharePoint Foundation (SPF). In SPF, you will need to specify the location using a hard coded URL. Unfortunately this will be limiting if you want to use different CSS files for different languages (since you won’t have a ~language token).

Demo

All right, we should now be set up with our “themable” CSS file. Draft up a slick looking master page and try it out. To get a better understanding of the color pallet that I’ll end up with my themes, I built into v4.master a large table showing all of the color permutations. I also included a sample image and tried out recoloring it. Below is what my creation looks like with the default color scheme (notice, I used white as the default settings for the background-color styles.

Next, I jump into the browser and pick a new Site Theme, how about Convention with Papyrus and Segoe Script as fonts. Now I’m greeted with a much more colorful table (see below). I themed the hyperlink texts and the image labels. For the recoloring, I used Dark2-Lightest (you can see the perfect color match between the Dark2-Lightest cell and the logo recolored with the filling method).

Example Code

Here’s an example piece of the CSS for the second logo image for which I themed the font, font color, and image color:

/* [ReplaceFont(themeFont: "MinorFont")] */ font-family:Verdana;
/* [ReplaceColor(themeColor:"Dark2-Darker")] */ color:black;
/* [RecolorImage(themeColor:"Dark2-Lightest",method:"Tinting")] */ background:url("/Style Library/images/spdicon1.png") no-repeat;

I’m actually quite amazed with the quality of image recoloring. If used correctly and stylistically, the SharePoint theming engine can really delight those of us that care about looks as well as functionality :)

Thanks for reading, and I hope you find the new SharePoint theming engine as exciting and useful as I have.

Managing SharePoint Designer 2010 Video

spdblog — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:48:00 GMT

Want to learn more about how to control SPD 2010 usage across your SharePoint sites? Check out this video tutorial for managing SharePoint Designer to get a comprehensive rundown. For more helpful tips and tricks, please also visit the Get the Point blog or their YouTube channel. Enjoy!

SharePoint Designer’s new workflow editor: keyboard shortcuts

spdblog — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:08:54 GMT

Travis here again from the SharePoint Designer development team. In my last post, I introduced you to a few of the new features of the workflow editor in SharePoint Designer 2010. This time, I’d like to show some of the new keyboard features in the editor that can make you more productive if you’re the sort of person who would rather avoid using the mouse unless it’s necessary.

If you’d like, open the sample workflow you were building in my last post, or create a new one. It doesn’t really matter. Note that as you move your mouse cursor around on the page, various things light up. Before and after each action, condition, and step are orange insertion points that light up. If you click there, you’ll put your cursor there and then can insert things at that location. Try clicking on an insertion point now.

A variety of common keyboard commands all work in the new workflow editor. For example, you can use the cursor keys to move the insertion point around the document, or Shift+Up to select the object above your current insertion point, or Delete to delete the object that is currently selected, Home and End to get to the beginning or end of the object that contains the insertion point (such as a step), or Ctrl+Home or Ctrl+End to get to the beginning or end of the entire workflow. (Those are just examples; there are more.)

You can also insert things without using the mouse. Like all other ribbons in your favorite Office apps, you can use the keyboard to navigate the ribbon. Press Alt, then W for the Workflow tab, then T for Action. Choose an action from the list using the keyboard and press Enter to insert it. You can then use Tab and Shift+Tab to cycle through the hyperlinks in your action. It works, but it’s not very fast.

SharePoint Designer 2010 has a much faster way of inserting things once you know the name of the action or condition you want, such as “Log to History List” or “Send an Email.” Try this: click inside an empty step to move the insertion point there. Then, start typing “log to”—right there at the cursor. The cursor will expand into a search box, and tell you how many things match what you just typed.

Eventually, you’ll see a checkmark icon and the text “Press Enter to insert Log to History List.” Do just that, and watch the search box disappear and the Log to History List action take its place. This works for all actions and conditions, as well as the other things in the Insert group on the ribbon, such as steps and else-if branches. Once you remember the names of things you want to insert, using this search box is a very fast way to add new things to your workflow—inserting Log to History List only actually takes three keypresses: L, O, and Enter. If you don't remember the name of an action or condition, but remember that it includes the word “send,” you can type “send” into the search box and press Enter to see a list of everything that matches that word. Choose the one you want and press Enter again to insert it.

The ribbon and this new search box can help you find features that have been around for a while that you didn’t even know existed. For example, did you know that in SharePoint Designer 2007 you can set multiple actions to run in parallel, so that the server won't wait for the first action to finish before it starts on the second one? That can be especially useful if the first action involves requesting information from a person who’s really busy (or lazy). That feature was there in the last version but few people knew about it. You can do this easily in SharePoint Designer 2010 by inserting a Parallel Block and then putting actions inside of it. It’s right there on the ribbon, or just a few keypresses away.

These are just some of the enhancements we’ve made to the workflow editor in SharePoint Designer 2010. We hope that they’ll save you a lot of time and help you build even more powerful workflows to take advantage of new SharePoint features, in less time than you could before. We’d love to hear what you think, so please let us know in comments and the SharePoint Designer forums.

SharePoint Designer’s new workflow editor: introduction

spdblog — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:16:51 GMT

Hi everybody, I’m Travis from the SharePoint Designer development team. Hopefully by now some of you have been able to download and evaluate the beta for SharePoint and SharePoint Designer 2010. (If you haven’t, consider this a sneak preview for the upcoming release.) SharePoint Designer 2010 has a brand new workflow editor. If you’ve used SharePoint Designer workflows in the past, the new editor might seem a bit overwhelming at first, but we’re confident that once you get used to it you’ll really appreciate the new features. These new tools give you more power and expressiveness in your workflows, and let you build them even faster than before.

For the purposes of this tour, I’m assuming that you have at least a little experience building workflows with SharePoint Designer. If you’d like to learn more about SharePoint workflows, check out the introductory content on Office Online.

Let’s take a look. First, create or open a site in SharePoint Designer. (SharePoint Designer 2010 only works against SharePoint 2010 servers, so you’ll need to have a test server up and running to follow along.) Once your site is opened, you’ll see the new site settings page, along with the ribbon, also new for this version. SharePoint Designer 2010 lets you create more types of workflows than before. In addition to a List Workflow, a workflow attached to a list just like you could create in the 2007 version, you can also create Reusable Workflows that can be used on multiple lists or content types, and Site Workflows that don’t use a list at all. (To see more options for creating workflows, check out the Workflows page by using the navigation pane on the left.) For now, let’s create a regular list workflow. Click the List Workflow button on the ribbon and then choose a list to attach it to from the dropdown list, such as Announcements. You’ll be asked to name your workflow, so give it a memorable name (I suggest “foofles”) and press Enter to create the workflow.

After you do that, you’ll be immediately taken to the new workflow editor. If you have any experience with the old one at all, you’ll notice that the new one is strikingly different. First off, like just about everything else in the new SharePoint Designer, it lives in a tab, so you can switch to other tabs, do other stuff, and then come back and continue working without having to save or close. You may also remember that the old workflow designer showed you one step of your workflow at a time, but the new one shows you your entire workflow at once. With a new workflow you should see a single box called “Step 1,” and a blinking orange cursor that I have lovingly named “Hypnocursor.” (That name didn’t really catch on.)

A workflow isn’t that useful with no actions in it. So, to insert your first action, click the Actions button on the ribbon to drop down the actions gallery. (Tip: If the Actions button isn’t enabled, it’s because your insertion point isn’t in a place where you can insert an action. Click in the middle of Step 1 and the Actions button should light up again. Clicking the edges of the step will select the whole thing, which isn’t what you want.) You’ll see your old favorite actions in the Actions list, as well as a host of new actions that we’ve added in this release. Go ahead and choose an action from the list to insert it. Now things should be pretty familiar—you get a sentence with little blue links that you can click to fill in the blanks. When you click links, things work mostly as they did in the last version, though the rest of the workflow team has been hard at work adding a bunch of new features that are a little out of the scope of this tour.

To insert your first condition, click the Conditions button on the ribbon to see the conditions gallery. Choose a condition and insert it. (You may notice that the top two conditions have been renamed—for example, “Compare any data source” is now called “If any value equals value.”) Whoa—inserting a condition adds a big new block to the editor, and you’ll notice that the condition is after the action you already inserted. This isn’t a mistake. The new workflow editor lets you have multiple conditional blocks, each with their own set of branches, in each step. They can be one after another, or you can even put conditional blocks inside of other branches. Actions inside of a branch will only happen if the conditions of the branch are met, just like before. If you put actions before or after a conditional block (a series of connected branches with conditions), those will happen before or after the actions that execute conditionally. To do that in SharePoint Designer 2007 would have required several steps, but you can do it all in the same step now if you want.

But, we want the action to happen only if it meets the condition we just created, and it’s easy to fix this. Just click on your action (anywhere except for a hyperlink) to select it. Then, use the Move Up and Move Down buttons on the ribbon to move it into the conditional branch. It will get indented so it’s easy to tell which branch it belongs to. You can even use Move Up and Move Down to move actions from one step to another.

It doesn’t stop at just moving actions, though. Let’s go ahead and add a new step to the workflow. Click in the space below Step 1 to move your cursor down there. Then, click Step on the ribbon to add a new one. Now, you can select that whole conditional block you created. When you move your cursor over the block, notice that you get a rectangle highlight over the branch and block. You can click on the thick bar to the left of the block to select the whole thing.

Once the block is selected, you can use the same Move Up and Move down buttons to move the whole block into the next step!

There’s one more time-saving feature that I’d like to show you today, and that’s the ability to save a nonfunctional draft of your workflow. In the old workflow dialog, you’d click Finish to save your changes, which would upload a bunch of files to the server, compile them, verify them, and do a bunch of stuff that can sometimes take a long time. You can do that in the new editor too, using the Publish button on the ribbon. But when you’re first building your workflow, you don’t really need to compile it or build forms for it or any of that stuff. You don’t even want it to show up in the list of workflows for a list until it’s ready. So, we’ve added a regular Save command this time around. When you click Save on the Quick Access Toolbar in the upper-left corner (or press Ctrl+S or any other way you normally save things), your workflow files will still be saved on the server, but all of the other parts of the process will be skipped, so it doesn’t take nearly as long. When you’re finished with the first version of your workflow and are ready to deploy it, then you can use Publish to finalize it and make it live.

Well, this post is already getting long, so this seems like a good place to end it. Stay tuned for another post about the cool keyboarding features in our new workflow editor, coming shortly.

Overview of Human Workflow in SharePoint 2010

spdblog — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:15:00 GMT

Hi folks, Sean Gabriel here, Program Manager on the SPD workflow team. I recently presented a session on human workflow at SPC, and wanted to share out the core of the talk with a broader audience. We’ll also be following up with deep dives into the nuts and bolts of designing workflows in SharePoint 2010, so keep an eye out for upcoming posts. The product team has put a ton of work into the new and improved workflow capabilities of 2010, and we hope you’re as excited as we are about the upcoming release!

To help set the stage, let’s take a look at the world according to workflow (click for a larger view):

One of our big messages for the release is around providing a broad continuum for the workflow solutions you build, and this graph-like slide is meant to reflect that. The horizontal axis covers the tools you can work with, and the vertical axis is a rough scale of the workflow capabilities available at that level. The further along the curve you go, the more sophisticated your solution becomes.

Starting on the left, we’re continuing to deliver built-in approval based workflows in 2010, ready to associate out of the box. These are designed to help you track processes from start to finish by assigning out workflow tasks in the manner you specify, and they’re easily configured with settings like due dates using the browser UI. But this time around, we’ve built them up using the declarative workflow stack, and they make use of a number of platform enhancements like reusability, InfoPath forms, visualizations, and the task process designer.

What does that mean? In essence, the out-of-box approval is no longer a black box as far as customizations go; you can now use SharePoint Designer 2010 to the workflow directly to suit your business needs. (You can also easily make a copy to edit, or use the underlying task process in another workflow – more on this in a bit.) Changing the way tasks are assigned, editing the e-mail notifications that get sent out, or altering the set of fields on any of the workflow forms are some examples of the customizations now easily within reach. Look for a future post to dive deeper into the new workflow designer experience in SPD.

As you start digging into the out-of-box workflows using SPD, you’ll notice that the body of each is a variant of a “start an approval process” activity. That’s because at the heart of each approval workflow is a new declarative activity that we’ve internally named the ‘OfficeTask’, and it holds the core routing logic for each process. We found that a lot of processes, from informal content reviews to structured expense reporting, follow similar routing patterns but with a wide variety of behaviors specific to the different stages in the process. As such, we designed this enhanced activity with these key extensibility points in mind, while still preserving a common flow between stages.

Here’s a simplified diagram of what’s under the hood:

Without jumping into too many specifics, you’re able to change behaviors that apply either to the entire task hierarchy, or just to individual tasks that get assigned out, as well as manage the transitions between them. Each part of the process highlighted above is, in turn, a self-contained miniature designer within the overall workflow. We also light up some task-specific actions when you’re working in the various regions (some of our favorites are adding new tasks on the fly, delegating a task to someone else, or escalating it to a manager). The best way to learn is to try it out! Since the approval workflow uses this same infrastructure, you can inspect its logic in SPD and see how we’ve implemented common behaviors you’re already familiar with.

A quick word on tooling as well – while SharePoint Designer still employs a rules-based design experience for building and customizing workflows, you can now round trip your work through Visio and leverage the benefits of a graphical designer (complete with a stencil for all the SharePoint workflow actions!) to better visualize the overall flow. And when you need to move to a custom coded solution, you don’t need to lose all the great work you started with in SPD; Visual Studio now imports the declarative workflows that SPD generates, and you can quickly pick up where you left off.

In addition, we’ve done a lot of work to integrate with the sandboxed solution infrastructure in SharePoint so if you can contain your code needs to a simple activity, you can deploy and run that code as partially trusted within a larger declarative workflow. Our colleagues in the Business Connectivity Services team have started blogging about this and other cool extensibility points for workflow, like external list integration; if you’re itching to learn more now, check out a few of their posts here, here, and here.

That about sums up the 10,000 foot view – though there’s so much more to cover, and we also want to hear from you about what you’re most interested in seeing us write about here. Feel free to post your questions in comments, and looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Cheers,
Sean

Skewer Click Saves the Day – Page and Master Page Styling Tips

spdblog — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Hi. Kolby here, a Program Manager on the SharePoint Designer team. Today I want to show you a couple nice tools that come in handy when modifying page styles and layouts that use CSS. I’ve personally found them very helpful when making custom master pages. I particularly want to highlight a new feature called Skewer Click, which is available in the Editing group of the Home tab in the page editor.

Figure 1. Check out the new Skewer Click feature available in the page editor. This tool skewers a page a shows you each tag layer you went through.

Often times with a complex page it is very difficult to find where certain styles are coming from (and hence where to change them). Skewer Click is very helpful for finding all of the elements and their styles responsible for rendering a UI element. To use it, click the Ribbon button, hover over any part of the page and click once. You will get a pop-up list of all the tags that a skewer would go through if you skewered through the page at that point. This works especially well if you have the CSS Properties pane open, because you can see by hovering over each tag what properties are applied and by what style.

Here’s an example: I was recently trying to modify the Out of Box master page to have a different color header. In order to change the color, I needed to know where it was specified. I opened v4.master in SharePoint Designer 2010, opened the CSS properties task pane and selected the Summary button (shows only CSS properties that contain something), clicked Skewer Click, and then clicked on the dark blue header (see Figure 2). From hovering over the tags shown, I quickly found out that the header is made up of a solid color with a transparent gradient rendered on top. I could then change either to adjust the header to the look the way I want it to.

Figure 2. Once the page is "skewered", you get a pop up list of all the tag layers at that point. Hovering over the different tags with the CSS Properties task pane open shows you what properties are applied in each tag.

Another tool that might come in handy is the “New Copy Style…” button in SharePoint Designer. When I was editing my master page in the above example, I wanted a quick way to modify my master page in a way that I could also pass my changes to friends and move to other sites. A simple way to do this is by creating a new CSS file that contains all of my style that I will link to the v4.master. I can then pass this one CSS file around. Also, if I use it carefully, it won’t affect theming in SharePoint.

Right clicking on the CSS Properties pane on the background-color style that I want to change I see New Copy Style. Selecting it will open the New Style dialog. The first time I use this, I’m going to set “Define in:” to new style sheet. I’ll change my background color and click okay. I then get a warning dialog asking me if I want to attach the CSS sheet with the new style. I’ll select okay. The next time I use New Copy Style I can add it to my new CSS file.

Figure 3. Using Skewer Click, we were able to quickly change the header color to our master page.

Now there’s one mistake that I’ve made if I want to preserve theming on the site. The color that I just replaced is actually a theme color. We see this by looking in the CSS file and seeing [ReplaceColor(themeColor:”Dark2”…)] below. In this case, we would be better off changing the site theme rather than the master page (for example, our change didn’t affect hover states). If you change a style that contains a replaced color you don’t want to affect, simply remove the line after the replace color snippet (background-color in this case).

The third and last tip in this post is to use the developer toolbar that comes with many internet browsers. The Internet Explorer “Developer Tools” for example is very helpful for finding styling too. In IE 8, you just need to press F12 to open it. Say we want to find where the quick launch header blue is coming from (see Libraries and Lists in Figure 3). Select the pointer arrow from the developer tools, hover over the target text until its container is boxed in blue, then click once. The toolbar will show you all of the CSS markings and which ones are finally applied to give the style shown. In this case it is “.s4-ql UL.root > LI > .menu-item”. If we want to overwrite this style, we can open corev4.css and again use New Copy Style to overwrite it in our new CSS file.

I’ve found these tools super helpful for styles, colors, layouts and more. I hope you enjoy them too!

SharePoint 2010 List View Blog Series: Part 2 - Using the New SharePoint Lists

spdblog — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 05:44:00 GMT

Part 2 of the series has been posted to the SharePoint Team Blog. Happy reading!

Visualizing Data using XSLT: Following up on SPC 2009’s session on Building SharePoint Mashups With SPD, Bing Maps and REST Services

spdblog — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:48:00 GMT

There’s been a lot of interest in the demo that was done at the SharePoint Conference where we used XSLT to visualize a contact list as a map. We have existing information out there on this topic so we wanted to bring it all together in one blog entry. I’ll also walk through the XSL file that was used in our demo and provide some pointers on how to use it for your own development.

For our demo, we mashed up a contacts list with a map and then created a detail page where we pull in information for a specific contact from Twitter and MSN Weather for our contact’s specific location. (To see how to do this using SharePoint Designer 2007, see this blog.)

We had lots of request for the details behind the XSL file that was used in our demo, which is attached to the end of this post. Let’s talk through some key things:

In the first part of the XSLT, the map is created. For your own map, you’ll need to generate a key specific to your site collection.

Figure 1. First part of the XSLT used for the map visualization where the map key is specified.

The next section of the XSLT file will place a marker in the correct location for each of the contacts in our list.

Figure 2. Next part of XSLT where the map is created and each location specified by a marker.

Finally, we have the details of how the address is built and used to get the latitude/longitude from the map services as well as our custom code to show the details in a bubble with a link to our details page.

Figure 3. Last section of the XSLT where address and link back to details page are created.

This file was very specific for our demo so before you hit up against its limitations, check out this blog posting on using XSLT from one of our developers, Jon Campbell.

We hope this answers any questions that came out of the conference session and more than that, we hope that compiling all of this information on the use of XSLT in one place helps make it easier to build into your own projects.

- Doreen Grieb

Video Blogging with Javascript and the Media Web Part

spdblog — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:17:00 GMT

Hi there, Mihai Coman here. I’m a new Program Manager on the SharePoint Designer team.

Over the last couple of weeks you’ve gotten a better idea of some of the new capabilities of SharePoint Designer. There’s a ton of new features and UI components to play with, from Content Type workflows to XLV to summary pages . But if you’re like me, you’re probably itching to get your hands dirty and see how everything fits together. What better way to scratch that itch than with a practical project?

We’re not going to work on just any old project here. In this entry I’m going to teach you how to use the new Media Web Part, Asset Library, and a few lines of Javascript to add video functionality to SharePoint’s built-in Blog template. I won’t be going in depth on anything but the SPD aspect of all this – expect to see a full treatment of SharePoint’s new video functionality soon on the SharePoint Blog.

So why would you want to be able to include videos in your blog posts? Perhaps you found a great music video online that you want to share with your readers. Or perhaps you want your readers to see you playing an acoustic version of that same song. Better yet, perhaps you want your readers to play the two videos side by side so they can see that you’ve hit the notes dead on. You’ll obviously need a place to upload videos and a way to specify what video(s) you want and where you want them to play in each blog entry. Here’s how it might work:

It’s very simple. First, you click the new “Upload a Video” button in the Blog Tools pane on the upper right side of the main page (see above screenshot). After uploading your videos, you click “Manage Videos,” copy the addresses of the newly uploaded videos and include them anywhere in your blog post using the tag <BLOGVIDEO: video URL> . When you publish your entry, the videos show up in the right places throughout your entry.

So how much work would it be to implement this? Surprisingly little. You’ll need a MOSS server with the “Publishing” feature activated. Starting with SharePoint’s blog template, you’ll simply add an Asset Library, import a Javascript file, and add less than 10 lines of code to your Master Page. Most of the work is done by the new Media Web Part and its createMediaPlayer method. The following will be split into four sections – the first three outline library setup, page setup, and introduce the createMediaPlayer method. The fourth section explains some of the provided code that ties it all together – you’re free to skip it if you’re not the curious type.

Let’s get started!

Setting up the Asset Library

First things first. Our solution builds on top of SharePoint’s built-in Blog template so we’ll need to start with that. Create a new sub-site using the Blog template and name it whatever you want. I named mine “Mihai’s Video Blog.” I assume you won’t need instructions for this part – if you do, use the experience as a chance to get acquainted with SharePoint’s new browser interface.

Now we’re going to need a place to store the videos that we use. A new kind of document library called an Asset Library is going to provide that storage. Open up your site in SPD, click on Lists and Libraries in the Navigation pane, and from the Document Library button in the Ribbon, choose Asset Library (Figure 1). Name your new library “Videos.”

Figure 1

Figure 2

In the summary window for the Videos library, remove the Audio, Image, and Folder content types by highlighting each and pressing the “Delete” key (Figure 2). Now, in the same window, click “Edit List Columns.” Delete most of the fields listed so that you’re left with a listing similar to that of Figure 3.

Figure 3

The All-Important createMediaPlayer Method

Now for an aside. If you learn anything from today’s blog entry, I hope it’s this. This method of the Media Web Part does the bulk of the heavy lifting in the remainder of our project.

   mediaPlayer.createMediaPlayer(
                videoHolder,   videoHolder.id, '400px',   '266px',
                 {
                     displayMode: 'Inline',
                     mediaTitle: 'Video Entry',
                     mediaSource: videoURL,
                     previewImageSource:'',
                     autoPlay: false,
                     loop: true,
                     mediaFileExtensions:'wmv;wma;avi;mpg;mp3;',
                     silverlightMediaExtensions:'wmv;wma;mp3;'
                 }
            );

If ever you want to insert a Media Player into any section of a SharePoint page, you simply include this script anywhere on the page with the appropriate videoHolder and videoURL parameters. VideoHolder should be a reference to the page element that will hold the player (any div, for instance), and videoURL should be an absolute or relative URL to a video.

Why would you need to type code to use the Media Web Part when you can just insert it into a page through the browser? The answer involves added functionality. Although you can set up the Media Web Part in the browser and specify a file to play, without Javascript and the createMediaPlayer function you won’t be able to:

Dynamically set what file the Media Player loads (based perhaps on page parameters and content)
Automatically create additional media player web parts like, say, one for every place where you want to include a video in your blog post.

We’ll need to have both of these abilities for our video blog. Keep reading to see how we do it.

Inserting Javascript into the Page

Back to work. Our storage solution is set but we’ll need some way of displaying uploaded videos in our blog entries. We’ll also need a quick way of uploading videos so that we’re not forced to navigate to SharePoint’s “All Site Content” section every time.

This is where Javascript comes in handy.

We’re going to split the Javascript code into two pieces: a major one that’s going to live in a standalone .js file in the Site Assets folder, and a minor one that’s going to go in our Mater Page. The former does all of the heavy lifting – it’ll be thoroughly explained, while the latter simply calls functions in the other.

First let’s get the major file onto our site. Start by downloading this to your computer. Click on Site Assets in the Navigation pane, then click on Import Files in the ribbon (Figure 4). In the dialog box that opens, click “Add” and choose videoBlog.js from your computer. Click “OK.” Done! In case you’re curious: there is no standard for where Javascript files go. You could very well have placed this file under “Site Pages” instead.

Figure 4

Now we’re going to stick the “minor” snippet of Javascript into the Blog site’s Master Page. Since all pages on the site use the same Master Page, the Javascript will be run upon loading any page. If for some reason you decided not to edit the Master Page, you would have to insert this script into the site’s “default.aspx” file and into several views of the Posts list. Click on “Master Pages” in the Navigation pane, right click on v4.master, and choose “Edit File in Advanced Mode.” V4.master is the Master Page that implements SharePoint’s fancy new web interface, including the top page ribbon, new color scheme, sidebar, and so on.

In Code View, scroll to the very bottom of the page and insert the following lines of code right above the final </html> statement. Figure 5 shows you exactly where. Then hit Save and click “yes” when you are prompted whether you want to modify the page from the site definition. All this means is that SharePoint will store the Master Page somewhere else under the hood.

Figure 5

That wasn’t too bad, was it? The first four lines simply link to Javascript resources. The first allows us to use the JQuery library (which we need later for selecting elements by class name), the second and third are simply the file we imported earlier (but with different relative paths so that both default.aspx and other pages can reach it), and the fourth is the Javascript file that the Media Web Part needs to run. You’ll always need to include that last one if you’re going to use the createMediaPlayer method. The code ends with two simple function calls. The first calls a function in our imported Javascript file that creates links to upload and manage videos in the “Blog Tools” sidebar section (since that sidebar is a non-customizable Web Part), and the second calls a function that inserts videos wherever you specify in your blog entries.

That’s it! You’re actually done. When you browse to your blog now, you should be able to click the new “Upload Video” link in the Blog Tools pane to upload each video you want. After they’re uploaded, you’ll click “Manage Videos,” copy the appropriate URLs and paste them anywhere in your blog entries by using the <BLOGVIDEO: Video URL Here> tag. Your new blog entries will show up with the appropriate videos in place of these tags.

How Does It Work?

You didn’t think I would just leave you wondering how it all worked, did you? Of course not. Before wrapping up, I’ll explain how the insertVideos function inside videoBlog.js does its magic. Below is some code from videoBlog.js and an explanation.

I admit, it’s a little more intimidating. But don’t worry, it’s easy to understand. I’ve split the code into three sections in the screenshot above, each of which is explained below.

1. The insertVideos function starts by using JQuery selector syntax to get a list of all the blog entries on the page – all of these have the class name “ms-PostBody.” We use JQuery because Javascript has no built-in functionality for finding elements solely by class. For each of those blog entries, it then uses a Javascript regular expression to find any text of the form <BLOGVIDEO: some URL> and replaces it with an HTML div element of the form “<div id=’videoHolderX’>”, where X is some number. Remember how the createMediaPlayer method took arguments for videoURL and video holder? In the end, by associating the replaced video URL with a uniquely IDed div, we’ll be able to insert each media player in the correct location within the blog entry. This is all implemented by the replace method on line 11 which takes as its first argument the string to search for and as its second argument the replacing string. In our case, we don’t have an exact string to search for - we only know that we need something of the form <BLOGVIDEO: some URL> – thus we use a regular expression. I won’t go into how the regular expression works, but you can find a great tutorial at http://javascriptkit.com/jsref/regexp.shtml. As I suggested above, we also don’t know the exact string we want to replace our matches with since we need a different number at the end of each div ID of the form videoHolderX. That’s why, for each match, the function getHolderCode gets called.

2. getHolderCode’s job in this process is to increment the vidIndex global variable (thus setting X in “videoHolderX” to a unique value) and to associate this index value with the parsed URL of the video by storing the two in the global variables vidIndices and vidURLs. You’ll notice on line 23 that the argument “matched” is passed in. Each time getHolderCode is called, this argument holds a match of the form <BLOGVIDEO: some URL>. The next two lines parse the match again to get the URL within, accounting for the fact that SharePoint saves working URLs as links, making it necessary for us to also find strings of the form <BLOGVIDEO:<A href=”someURL”… >…>. Each line makes use of the RegExp object’s lastParen property, which extracts the last sub-expression in parentheses from the match (in our case, the URL we need). The next few lines save the extracted videoURL and the associated ID, and return the “incremented” replacing text.

3. Once every <BLOGVIDEO> tag on the page has been replaced with a <div id=’videoHolderX’> element and the changes have been saved to the page (line 12), the function loops through every video, passing its URL and a reference to the matching video holder div to a function that further passes them to the createMediaPlayer method (which I covered at the beginning of this entry).

And that’s how you convert your regular old blog into a video blog. I won’t get into how I modified the Blog Tool links, tweaks for non-IE browsers, or more efficient (but messier) parsing methods. Feel free to discuss these or ask specific questions. For the time being, enjoy your video blog and, until next time, have fun playing with SharePoint Designer!

SharePoint 2010 List View Blog Series: Part 1 – Introduction to the new List View

spdblog — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:46:00 GMT

Hello. This is Greg Chan, a Program Manager on the SharePoint team. I am excited to kick-off a new blog series that will cover a wide spectrum of topics related to the new List View in SharePoint 2010.

What is a List View again?

Put simply, a List View is a view for displaying SharePoint list data. The concept of List View has been around since SharePoint v2. While there are other technologies being used for visualizing list data in different scenarios (e.g. Content Query Web Part), List View remains the default component for displaying list data in SharePoint 2010.

List Views can be spotted everywhere in SharePoint. They are used to display information such as your announcements, tasks and calendar schedules.

Examples of list views:

What’s the big change with List Views in 2010?

In 2010, we are introducing a component called the XSLT List View Web Part (XLV) that serves as the new default technology for displaying list data. This honor used to belong to the List View Web Part (LVWP), which was the default from SharePoint v2 to 2007. (Note: LVWPs are still supported in SharePoint 2010, but just not as widely used as the new XLV.)

The new XLV brings a ton of improvements to the SharePoint platform. This blog series aim to cover most of these areas.

What are the key benefits to the new List Views (XLV)?

Replacing the default technology for List Views required fundamental changes to the SharePoint platform. So why did we do it? Let me call out the high level benefits of the XLV:

More Designer Friendly
- Rich customization support through SharePoint Designer while preserving browser UI experience
- Extensible and shareable custom styles
- Popular designer features such as Conditional Formatting.
More Developer Friendly
- Uses standards-based XSLT instead of CAML
- Better documentation
- Easily extensible
More End-User Friendly
- Enhanced user experience including Ribbon UI and new multi-selection model.
- Inline editing support
More Robust Ways to Access Data
- Display enterprise data through Business Connectivity Services (BCS)
- Cross-web list views displaying data from another web
- Display list data joined from different lists

What’s coming up in the blog series?

Many people from different teams in the SharePoint family contributed to the new List View in SharePoint 2010. In this blog series, you’ll get a chance to hear from some of those area experts covering key List View topics.

Here are the topics that will be covered:

Introduction to the new List View (you are reading it! :)
List View – New User Experience
List View Architecture
List View Customization
External Lists
Conditional Formatting
How to Share Your Custom List View Styles
How to Create Custom Fields for the new List View
Related Item View
How to Create Views Displaying Cross-Web and Joined List Data

The order in which these topics will be published may change. We may also add or modify topics on this list. If there is any areas regarding List Views that you’d like to learn about and isn’t on this list, feel free to suggest them here.

Thanks for reading. I hope everyone is excited about the new List Views. Stayed tuned for more!

Greg Chan

SharePoint Designer 2010 New Shell Tour

spdblog — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:20:00 GMT

Welcome to SharePoint Designer 2010! As Todd Haugen mentioned in his latest blog, we’ve got a number of wonderful features this release and we’re really excited to get them into your hands. This is a follow-up blog to dive into the new shell, or user interface, of SPD 2010. I think this is one of the greatest enhancements for the 2010 release. The new shell of SPD 2010 targets new and old users alike by highlighting SharePoint artifacts (not the folder structure they’re stored in), presenting key information you want to know about those artifacts, bubbling the tools and commands up to the Ribbon, and giving you intuitive navigation to explore, modify, and create rich and powerful SharePoint sites.

Opening a Site

Let’s start with what you will see first - opening a site. Figure 1 below shows the Sites Place in the Microsoft Office “Backstage” feature. Here in the Sites place, we have 4 areas: Open SharePoint Site, Recent Sites (my favorite), New SharePoint Site, and Site Templates. These categories are pretty self-explanatory. Notice two buttons that mention My Sites. Of course, you’ll need the Microsoft SharePoint Server feature to use these buttons. Something else that’s cool is the Site Templates category. This by default shows Blank, Blog, and Team Site. But, clicking More Templates you can browse for a server with more templates, then mark favorites that will show up by default next time you open SPD. As I mentioned before, my favorite section is the Recent Sites. This list shows the recent sites you’ve visited and with one click the site opens – a real time saver.

The first time you open SPD, you’ll need to click the “Open Site” button. This brings up a dialog similar to 2007. Type your SharePoint 2010 site address where it says “Site name:” then click open. You can browse for any of its subsites, or click open again to open the site.

Figure 1. The first thing seen on booting SharePoint Designer 2010 is the Sites Place in the Backstage. From here you can open a site or create a new one.

Galleries, Settings, and Editors

Ta dah! What you see next is very different from SPD 2007 (figures 2 and 3 below show 2010 and 2007 respectfully).

Figure 2. After opening a site, you're launched Onstage to the new user interface of SharePoint Designer 2010. We have incorporated the ribbon, a navigation pane focusing on SharePoint artifacts, a breadcrumb with helpful navigation, and the concept of Gallery Pages, Settings Pages, and Editors. This image is the Site Settings Page – showing key site information, links to quick customizations, general settings, site permissions, and subsites. The ribbon has commands to create artifacts and manage the site as a whole.

Figure 3. Opening SharePoint Designer 2007 launched to a new and blank html page. The core of the user interface was based around the page editor and file structure.

The first thing you may notice is the Ribbon. Also, there’s a lot less white space (we don’t open a blank .html page for you). Instead there’s a spread of information contained in labeled sections. Last but not least, the Navigation Pane on the left. I’ll talk a bit more of the navigation (nav) pane soon, but one thing to note is what it contains – SharePoint artifacts. When you’re looking for something, you don’t have to remember where it’s stored.

Settings Pages

Let’s dive into the assortment of information on the opening page (Figure 2). This is what we call a “Settings Page” which surfaces relevant information and related artifacts for the specific thing you’re looking at. The first page shown upon opening a site is the site settings page, which displays key site information (name, description, URL, SharePoint version number, etc.), permissions for the site, quick customization links, general settings, and a list of subsites below the current site. Settings pages all have a similar layout, but might contain different packets of information. For example, the list settings page shown in Todd’s blog displays key list information, customization links, general list settings, views, forms, custom actions, and workflows associated to the list. These settings pages serve as great launching places for building or modifying the artifacts. Modifying a list may require adjusting settings, permissions, creating a new view or form, or even modifying list schema. All of these actions are reachable in at most one click from list settings page.

Gallery Pages

Gallery pages show a list of artifacts. These are usually reached by clicking an item in the nav pane. Clicking Lists and Libraries will open the Lists and Libraries Gallery shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. The list and libraries gallery shows all of the lists and document libraries in the site.

Gallery pages are helpful for getting a big-picture look at contents of the site: how many workflows there are, or what types of list you have, etc. The ribbon is alive here, and you can perform actions like creation, or editing, and there’s also some links to the browser (I use the F12 shortcut to preview in browser all the time). Galleries can also be viewed as a “mini-gallery” below the artifacts in the nav pane. Use the pin to the right of the artifacts to pin open the gallery (see Figure 5). One cool shortcut I’ll mention here is that most galleries have different behaviors for single and double clicking. Single clicking the name of an artifact will open its settings page. Double clicking the item will open its editor.

Figure 5. Mini-galleries can be pinned open from the navigation pane. Here, the data source gallery is showing list data.

Editors

Some artifacts in SPD have a separate view for editing: Lists/Libraries, Content Types, External Content Types, Pages, and Workflows. These editors are all worthy of blogs themselves. The page editor is very similar to the whole of SPD 2007. It incorporates the ribbon, and there are a couple great new features (like Skewer Click) that are worth checking out. The workflow editor is now full screen, and packed with new and wonderful features (definitely look for a blog on this coming soon). The schema editors for lists and content types are fast and very helpful for rapid prototyping. And lastly, the external content type editor is a powerful tool to pull in external data systems into SharePoint (for sure going to be a blog or two on this – way cool!).

Breadcrumb, Tabs, and Navigation

The navigation story is one of the most helpful parts of the new shell. It’s a suite of features that help users find what they want quickly and easily. Much of the user interface navigation can be compared to Windows Explorer. There is a breadcrumb with back and forward buttons (I use my extra mouse buttons all of the time for these back and forward clicks). The breadcrumb is great for drilling down or stepping upward. Figure 6 below shows drilling down options from the Calendar list settings page.

Figure 6. The breadcrumb allows for quick drilling down or stepping upward. The Back and Forward buttons act just like a web browser.

Each tab will also keep a memory of its history, so you can bounce backward in time (Figure 7).

Figure 7. The history button in the breadcrumb is often very handy. Each tab remembers its history, and like a web browser you sometimes want to jump backward multiple steps.

Of course, the navigation pane already mentioned is a great starting point. Clicking an item in the nav pane will usually open a new tab to display the gallery page for that item. If your current tab is a gallery already, it will navigate within the tab. The last two sentences may be a little tricky to understand without trying it yourself, but we hope it just feels right when you’re doing it, and it’s helpful for managing the number of tabs you have open. One really cool feature is the ability to drag tabs in the order that you like (similar to Internet Explorer). This is really helpful for me when I’m working with a page and a couple .css files. If I opened them in a different order that I want to organize them, “click-swipe” and I’m organized. You can also open new tabs by clicking the mini-tab on the right of the last tab.

Odds and Ends

Here’s just a couple blurbs on other things I thought were worth mentioning.

Log In As…

In 2007 it was quite tricky to log into SPD as a different user profile (someone explained once how to do it, but I was lost after step 2). In 2010 however, clicking the little figure in the lower left allows you to sign out and back in with a different user profile. This is also a great way for site owners to see how our permission controls affect users of differing permissions. Look for a blog soon on the “Giving IT Control” feature that allows administrators the ability to control what their users can do with SPD.

Figure 8. The Log In As feature is helpful for users or teams multiple accounts.

Ribbon and QAT Customization

Along with Add-ins, you can add commands to the QAT (Quick Access Toolbar) and Ribbon with the new extensibility available (see Figure 9).

Figure 9. The Quick Access Toolbar and Ribbon are easily customized to contain what you want. Here I’ve added some commands to the QAT and I’ve created my own ribbon tab with my favorite buttons.

A Few Limitations to Call Out

Early on in development we made a tough choice. Not supporting backwards compatibility with SharePoint v3 and earlier. This means that SPD 2010 will only work with SharePoint 2010. Although this was hard, it allowed us to build better, farther and test deeper. I almost think of SPD 2010 as a new product, a new toolset for SharePoint 2010. This of course means that we are supporting side-by-side installation of SPD 2007 and 2010. There is one important thing to keep in mind when setting up side-by-side. Stick to the same flavor of clients (x64 and x86). SPD 2007 only came in x86, so only use x86 SPD 2010 when installing side-by-side. This is for all Microsoft Office apps as well. So don’t install 64-bit SPD with 32-bit Office.

As we shifted to being a powerful and usable toolset for SharePoint 2010, we securely attached to SharePoint. In other words, SPD focused at being only a SharePoint tool. Unfortunate for some, this means that you won’t be able to use its page editor without also having SharePoint. The page editor is only available when a SharePoint site is open. If you try to open a page in SPD without opening a site first, you will get the following error message. Microsoft Expression Web is our recommended tool for stand alone page editing.

Figure 10. SharePoint Designer 2010 is tied to SharePoint, and cannot be used as an independent page editor. Without a site open, you will get this error when opening a page or file with SPD.

Wrap Up

Thanks so much for reading! SharePoint Designer 2010 is an easy-to-use, robust, helpful, and a slick-looking tool. The full spectrum of users, from Information Workers to Power Developers, will see value and usability in SharePoint Designer 2010. Keep your eyes out for more blogs on other great features and our Beta2 release. We’re so excited for SharePoint 2010 and hope you are too!

Putting the SharePoint in SharePoint Designer

spdblog — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:36:00 GMT

For those of you who have been with us for the long haul, you know SharePoint Designer (SPD) evolved from the FrontPage product. The result of this lineage was SPD 2007 largely focused on web page editing and added some SharePoint capabilities. In SPD 2010, we increased our investment in SharePoint capabilities and focused on exposing the power of SharePoint to both power users and developers alike. SharePoint has always been about the democratization of web development - think of SPD 2010 as furthering that goal.

Figure 1. SPD's new shell focuses more on SharePoint objects and less on the file structure and page editor. The UI is now much more intuitive and helpful with the Ribbon and navigation pane.

When you think about democratization, a few words come to mind: awareness, access, utility. If you're an IT shop, some other words might come to mind too: safe, supported, compliant, and dare I say governed? When we started our mission, we took these words to heart. We were more successful addressing some goals than others, but let’s be clear, we understand that it's not a good idea to simply empower every Tom, Dick, and Jane with a simple, powerful application building tool and just hope IT can deal with the explosion of applications.

So to that end we will start with the IT side of the equation:

Safe: Multi-tenancy is one of the huge strengths of SharePoint, but this often limits what users can do with the system. The shared nature of the system means users cannot add powerful server side code to the system. In this release we provide User Solutions, a server sandbox enabling users to upload their own code or code from a third party to complete their scenarios where that code runs in an isolated process. Even better, IT has control over the throttling and contents of the sandbox so shops can tune it for their level of comfort.
Supported: Historically when you put SPD in the hands of a user, despite best intentions, they broke things. And this resulted in support calls, lots of them. In this release SPD is Safe by Default. Users cannot simply edit the master page or delete a content place holder and bring down an entire site collection! This is a powerful IT feature that will require its own blog to explain in detail, but the gist is users cannot just open a site and break it before they even know what they’ve changed.
Compliant: Because we have locked down the capabilities in SPD, IT shops can now control which templates, master pages, and styles can be used in their orgs. This makes it easy to ensure sites comply with corporate policy.
Governed: In this release we did not only improve the supportability of SPD, we gave IT simple, granular control over who can use SPD on which areas of their farm.

Now that you know IT is going to bless the use of SPD, let’s dig into the end user aspects of the democratization of web development - awareness, access, and utility.

Awareness: We can make all the improvements in the world on this tool and it will be largely irrelevant if users are not aware the tool exists. To help address this issue and drive efficiencies we now directly link the SharePoint browser interface with SPD. Through these links we have significantly reduced the complexity of using SPD to edit specific, targeted aspects of SharePoint sites. This means users simply click a button in the browser and SPD is opened directly to the right spot. A future blog will cover all the links in detail but here is an example (Figure 2), cool huh! Yes, these links only show up if the user has permissions to SPD - remember what I said in the governance section?

Figure 2. Contextual links appear in the browser UI that link directly to the SPD design surface. For example, clicking the Modify in SharePoint Designer link will open SPD to the current site, then open the specific list view in the page editor for editing. Advanced customizations such as conditional formatting are now much easier to add.

Access: Many of you may not even know what SPD is or that it even existed, much less that this tool will help your organization get the most out of its SharePoint installation. There were two primary reasons for this lack of awareness, 1: due to its price tag many organizations opted not to buy only limited copies of SPD, and 2: because of its power, many IT organizations restricted the use of SPD on the network. This release our team worked hard to address these issues that blocked user access to SPD.

1. FREE! That is right, you heard me, FREE! SPD is now available as a free download.

2. Safe by Default, with this release it is very hard for users to shoot themselves in the foot. Look for a future blog on this - but suffice to say, it takes explicit permissions to unghost a page!

Figure 3. The new shell is highlighted by Settings Pages that quickly display relevant information and related artifacts to your SharePoint objects. This list settings page for example, displays key list information, general settings, list views, forms, custom actions, and workflows associated to the list. Using the ribbon it is easy to edit or add to this list.

In addition to the UI there are a number of other features we have added to make the tool more useful for IWs:

Workflows have been dramatically improved with a new editor (Figure 4), reusable workflows, and even more powerful workflows that come out of the box. Look for several workflow blogs to come out soon.

Figure 4. Workflows are now easier and more flexible to create in SPD. The full screen designer incorporates the ribbon and other intuitive UI.

XSLT List Views are also a big investment for us. XSLT list views are now the default view for lists which means developers only have to learn one list technology! This standardization also let us deliver some great features such as Push Button Styles that enable styling and conditional formatting with the push of a button. Of course we will have a blog or two on this topic too.

I hope you enjoyed reading about the breadth of features coming from SPD this release and we would love to have you back soon to read about these and other features in detail. For now let me leave you with a parting thought: in this release we invested heavily in IWs to complement the functionality offered to developers and designers. Additionally you will see amazing stuff from VS and Expressions in forthcoming releases integrating with SPD and the best SharePoint has to offer. Of course, look for blogs on these topics in the coming months too.

Signing off for now –
Todd Haugen (SPD GPM)

Service Pack 2 prevents an on-change workflow from starting itself

spdblog — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:38:09 GMT

Hello all, Stephen here again — I’m a writer for SharePoint Designer. I’d like to tell you about a fix that was included in Service Pack 2 for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This fix affects workflows designed in SharePoint Designer 2007. Then I’ll show you how to intentionally create a workflow loop by using two workflows instead of one.

Before Service Pack 2, it was too easy to inadvertently design a workflow that triggered itself and created an infinite loop. For example, consider this scenario:

1) A workflow starts when an item is changed.

2) The workflow updates (or changes) the current item (e.g. by using the Set Field in Current Item action).

3) Because the workflow changes the item, it triggers itself.

So if you had an on-change workflow that sends you an e-mail and then updates the current item, you could quickly receive several hundred e-mails in your Inbox.

After you install Service Pack 2 on your server, it is no longer possible for a workflow that starts when an item is changed to trigger itself by changing/updating the current item. This infinite-looping scenario is not possible:

Many people, however, have designed workflows that actually leverage infinite looping. For example, you could design an on-change workflow that loops endlessly on a task item and that sends a daily reminder until that task is marked complete. The workflow triggers itself by updating a Counter column that was added to the list just for this purpose. And the workflow has a rule that stops or “short circuits” the workflow if some condition is satisfied — in this case, the workflow stops without changing the current item if the task Status = Completed. After SP2, this workflow will in effect be broken because it cannot trigger itself.

SP2 does not block infinite loops, which can be useful, but to re-create what worked before you must design two (or more) on-change workflows that trigger each other. Two on-change workflows that trigger each other by updating/changing the current item is a “co-recursion” scenario:

In addition, it is very common to implement a state-based workflow by using several shorter workflows that trigger each other. For example, you might have a list with a Status field and several on-change workflows attached to that list. All of those workflows include a step at the end that updates the Status field. So one workflow triggers several others by updating the Status, and then those workflows look at the value in the Status field to determine whether they should continue running or stop. This state-based workflow is also a “co-recursion” scenario because one workflow starts many other on-change workflows by changing/updating the current item. Service Pack 2 does not block this type of state-based workflow that relies on co-recursion.

Recap

· Before SP2, a single on-change workflow could enter an infinite loop by updating the current item, thus triggering itself.

· After SP2, an on-change workflow can trigger any other on-change workflows by updating the current item, but an on-change workflow cannot trigger itself. So co-recursion scenarios -- including any scenario that implements a state-based workflow by using many smaller on-change workflows -- are not blocked.

· As a reminder, it has never been possible to create an infinite loop by having an on-create workflow create an item in the current list. Every workflow has a property that contains the “workflows I cannot start” — this property is used to prevent looping for workflows that start when an item is created.

· As a further reminder, all of the previous scenarios involve only workflows attached to a single list or library. Infinite looping in cross-list scenarios has never been blocked for either on-change or on-create workflows.

Creating loops before Service Pack 2

This section presents an example of how a single on-change workflow could leverage infinite looping before SP2. After SP2, this workflow will not trigger itself, so the next section presents an example of how to create a loop by using two separate workflows.

Assume you have a task list named Team Tasks, and you want to design a workflow that will send a reminder every day until the task is marked complete.

First, add a column named Counter to the list with a default value of 0.

You need to hide the Counter columns from the list forms (New Item, Edit Item) so that only the workflow can access/update it. Fist, on the list settings page, click Advanced Settings, and then allow the management of content types.

On the list settings page, click each content type, and on the next page click the Counter column. Make the Counter column hidden. Do this for every content type in the list.

After creating and hiding the Counter column so that it does not appear in forms, you’re ready to design the workflow.

The Daily Reminder workflow should start whenever an item is created or changed.

The first step checks for two things: (1) If the task has already been marked complete, the workflow stops. This rule “short-circuits” the loop whenever the task is finally marked complete. (2) If the task is not completed, the workflow checks to see if the due date is in the future (greater than today). If this is true, the workflow pauses until the due date, because you don’t want to send reminders until the due date has been reached.

The second steps again checks whether the task is completed (in case the workflow paused until a due date on the previous step, and the task was completed in the interim). If the task is still not complete, the workflow pauses for one day.

The third step again checks to see if the task was completed while the workflow was paused; if true, the workflow stops.

If the task has not been completed, the workflow (1) sends the e-mail reminder; (2) set the CurrentCount variable by doing a lookup to the Current Item/Counter field; (3) adds 1 to CurrentCount and stores this value in a NewCount variable; and (4) sets the Counter column to the value stored in the NewCount variable.

Basically, this step increments the Counter column by 1 each time the workflow runs, so you can look at the Counter column to see how many reminders have been sent. And most importantly, the “Set Field in Current Item” action at the end of this step is what “changes” the current item, thus causing the workflow to trigger itself and create the loop.

Creating loops after Service Pack 2

After SP2, you can still achieve this looping effect, but it requires designing two workflows that trigger each other (co-recursion) instead of a single workflow that triggers itself.

Here you’ll use a (1) Counter workflow that increments the count and a (2) Worker workflow that actually sends the reminder mail.

1st workflow — the Counter workflow

As above, you need to create a Counter column in the list with a default value of 0, allow the management of content types, and make this field hidden for every content type in the list.

This two-workflow design requires a second column, SendMail, which will act as a flag for the Worker workflow. The default value must be No – otherwise, any change to a task item would cause the reminder mail to be sent.

The Counter workflow will start when an item is created or changed.

The first step checks the task status – if the task is complete, the Counter workflow stops.

If the task due date is in the future (greater than today), the second step pauses until the due date, because you don’t want to send reminders until after the task is due.

The third step again checks for task completion, in case the task was completed while the workflow was paused on the previous step. If the task is still not complete, the workflow pauses for one day.

The final step checks the status again to see if the task was completed during the previous day-long pause. If not, the workflow updates the current item by (1) incrementing the value of the Counter column by one and (2) setting the SendMail flag to Yes (the default value is No).

2nd workflow — the Worker workflow

The Counter workflow above ends by updating (changing) the current item. These updates trigger the Worker workflow, which is set to start when an item is changed.

The Worker workflow simply checks to see if the SendMail flag is set to Yes; if true, the workflow sends the reminder message and sets the flag back to No.

Setting the SendMail flag to No is the change that triggers the Counter workflow above. The Counter and Worker workflows will trigger each other, sending daily reminders until the task is marked complete.

Alternatively, instead of an infinite loop, you can have the Worker workflow escalate the task notification when the Counter column reaches a certain value — say 5 reminders. The following step executes different branches depending on the reminder count. When the count reaches 5, the workflow sends a message to a manager, whose e-mail address you can either “hard-code” into the Send an Email action or retrieve from a list by using a workflow lookup.

You could also have the Worker workflow reassign the task to a different individual or group after a certain number of reminders have been sent. For this step, the workflow reassigns the task to a SharePoint group comprised of team members who are responsible for following up on such escalated tasks.

If you want to end the loop when the count reaches a certain number, also make sure to add a branch to the first step of the Counter workflow – not the Worker workflow. This branch stops the loop when the Counter column reaches 6.

I hope you find this useful.

—Stephen

Download SPD for FREE today!!

spdblog — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:29:00 GMT

Today we are excited to share with you some news about SharePoint Designer 2007. Starting now (April 2, 2009), SharePoint Designer 2007 will be available as a free download! We want more of you customizing SharePoint and feel that this a good way to put the tool in the hands of more people. You can find a lot more information in our site including:

a) Letter to our Customers

b) Frequently Asked Questions

c) Free Download

Also, make sure to watch this video where Tom Rizzo and J.R. Arredondo discuss these changes and provide some insights into what is coming in the future (pick the appropriate version for your bandwidth).

· Small size video (6MB)

· Medium size video (17 MB)

· Large size video (83 MB)

Regards,

The SharePoint Designer Team

Visio diagram and site template from Office Online workflow videos

spdblog — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:44:00 GMT

Hello all, Stephen here again. Awhile back I recorded a series of workflow videos that were posted on Office Online:

Watch this: Design a document review workflow solution

Many of you have submitted comments asking if I could make available both the Visio diagram shown in the videos and the solution itself.

I’m happy to oblige (and apologies for the delay), so please find attached to this blog post a .zip file containing the site template (.stp file) and Visio diagram (.vsd file).

A few notes:

The solution uses the Document Center site template found in SharePoint Server 2007 (not Windows SharePoint Services), so it must be deployed to a SharePoint Server environment.
The site template includes WorkflowDashboard.aspx, but the Data View on that page must be re-created by following the steps in the Part 12 video and the Part 13 video.
The URLs used in the e-mail messages in the workflows must be updated to reflect the path of the new site, as mentioned in the Part 14 video.

Hope you find this helpful.

Creating RESTful Mashups using SPD 2007 (Part 1)

spdblog — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 03:30:00 GMT

Hi! J.R. and Kolby here to share an exciting example of the mashup capabilities of SharePoint. This is the first of two blog entries discussing how to use SharePoint Designer 2007 to create mashups.

The word "mashup" has become one of the most repeated buzzwords in the industry over the past few years. Promising ease of data integration and rapid development, mashups have become an integral part of the Web 2.0 lexicon. Many people are now familiar with the stereotypical mashup example of some data rendered on a geographical map.

Most initial applications of mashup technologies happened in the consumer space. For example, in 2007 Microsoft set out to create a tool integrated with a social network targeting the typical MySpace user. Popfly™ was the result of those efforts and has a very large user base already. It was even voted as one of PC World’s Top 25 Most Innovative Products for 2007.

Information Technology (IT) organizations have now begun to consider the applicability of mashup technologies to business use, attracted not only by the potential benefits derived from giving end users the ability to get things done on their own, but also to maximize the return on investment on SOA and data integration initiatives.

This article focuses on building mashups using SharePoint. Specifically, we will show you how to connect to external REST services using SharePoint Designer to bring data into a page in the form of web parts, and connect these web parts to create the mashup. Finally, we will show you how to render data on a geographical map using XSLT.

Scenario

The business scenario we will implement is about recruiting. Imagine a recruiter who has to stay in touch with a group of potential recruits and provide each one of them with personalized conversations as part of the recruiting process. This scenario is applicable to HR recruiting, college and professional sports recruiting, etc. In our example, the recruiter would like a way to have some insight as to what is going on in the recruit’s life before placing a phone call to follow up. In order to accomplish this, the recruiter would like to create a mashup using Twitter, MSN Weather, and the recruit’s personal information stored in a SharePoint list.

End Result

Our solution will consist of two pages. The main page (default.aspx, shown in Figure 1) will show the recruits information in a list in addition to a geographical map that displays their location. When the user clicks on one of the pins or markers on the map, a bubble pops up showing basic information about the recruit. This bubble also includes a link to our second page (mashing.aspx, shown in Figure 2). This page shows the recruit’s information, his or her Twitter image and latest status, and local weather information from MSN Weather.

Figure 1. Final result of the default.aspx page.

Figure 2. Final result of the mashing.aspx page.

Figure 3 below shows the high level conceptual flow of our application. When a user clicks on the recruit’s name on default.aspx, they navigate to mashing.aspx. Mashing.aspx receives a parameter in the query string called “name” to determine which recruit to render. You can choose another parameter such as email address if you like. From a user perspective, it is easy to use mashing.aspx by knowing only the name of the recruit. It also makes it easy for us to test our page. We will discuss default.aspx in Part 2 of this blog entry. Today, we will focus on the creation of mashing.aspx, the page that mashes Twitter and MSN Weather data with the SharePoint list.

Figure 3. Conceptual flow between two pages.

Building the mashing.aspx Page

As we see in Figure 3, mashing.aspx has essentially three web parts: the individual’s information, the Twitter web part, and the MSN Weather web part. The following is a concise outline of how mashing.aspx is created:

Create a blank page in the desired location
Add the three web parts with the desired information from each data source
Connect the different web parts
Format as desired

Step 1. Create a page in the desired location

We will assume the SharePoint contact list is already created, and it is named “Recruits” (see Figure 4 below). This SharePoint list should contain basic recruit contact information. The two key pieces of information we want in this list are Email Address (to connect to Twitter) and Zip Code (to connect to MSN Weather).

Figure 4. The Recruits SharePoint list with contact information.

The first step is to create an .aspx page. Open SharePoint Designer to the site where you want to put the mashup, and click File > New > ASPX. This is shown in Figure 5:

Figure 5. Create a new .aspx page and save it with the desired name.

Save the page with the desired name and location (Ctrl+S or click the Save button). We are going to call the page mashing.aspx and locate it in the global site folder.

Hint: One helpful thing to do immediately after creating a new page, is to press enter a few times. This enlarges the form area, making it easier navigate the page editor. After entering data, it is easier to click back into the form to add more data separated by a space or two. We find this super helpful when trying to format the page later.

Figure 6. The saved page appears in the Folder List on the left.

Step 2. Add the desired information

After creating a new page, the next step is to place the desired information on the page. First, we will add contact information from the Recruits list onto the page. We’ll use a single item view. If the Data Source Library task pane is not already open, click Task Panes in the toolbar to open it. Display the available list information by clicking into the Data Source Library > Recruits > Show Data (see Figure 7).

Figure 7. To insert the web part containing the recruit's information, click on the Recruits list in the Data Source

Use Ctrl-click to highlight all of the desired fields that you want to display about the recruit (we will select Full Name, EmailAddress, Phone, Address, City, State, ZIP, and Country). Then click Insert Selected Fields as… > Single Item View (see Figure 8 and Figure 9).

Figure 8. Using Ctrl+click, choose the list fields that you want to display on the page. Then enter them as a Single Item View.

Figure 9. The list data after being placed on the page.

twitter.com

The next step will be to configure Server-side Scripts to pull in external data. We are going to use data from twitter.com and MSN Weather, both of which are RESTful services. Again, using the Data Source Library, click Server-side Scripts > Connect to a script or RSS Feed… Use the dialog to name the source (General tab) and enter the URL (Source tab). For twitter.com, we use the following URL service.

http://www.twitter.com/users/show.xml?email=youremail@domain.com

This URL passes one parameter, an email address. If the email address is associated with a twitter.com account, the service will pass back all of the account information including their current status and the URL for their profile image. Figures 10-12 show these steps…

Figure 10. Click "Connect to a script or RSS Feed..." to add an external REST data source.

Figure 11. Configure the source by following the dialog instructions. Here, the name of the source is added.

Figure 12. The URL is entered for the source. Here, the specific URL for the Twitter service is added.

After the service is configured, we can add the data to the page similar to the contact information. Click twitter.com > Show Data. Ctrl-click the status text and the profile_image_url >Insert Selected Fields as… > Single Item View (see Figure 13).

Figure 13. Pick the new Twitter data source, show its data, select the desired fields, and insert them as a Single Item View.

To show the profile picture as an image and not a URL you need to set the Format as Picture. This can be done via the On-Object User Interface (OOUI) dropdown menu. When you have focus on something, like a web part, you often see a ‘>’ or chevron on the top right of the object. Clicking the chevron opens a dropdown menu (the OOUI). To set change the picture to an image click the URL text > OOUI > Format as: > Picture. The image should then show (see Figures 14 and 15).

Figure 14. The external Twitter data has been added to the page. To show a picture instead of a URL, adjust its format.

Figure 15. The Twitter profile picture now appears as an image.

MSN Weather

Configuring and the MSN Weather data source follows the same procedures as the twitter example. The URL used to create the data connection is as follows.

http://weather.msn.com/RSS.aspx?wealocations=98052&weadegreetype=F

This URL passes two parameters: the location in Zip code form and the units for the temperature (F = Fahrenheit and C = Celsius). Use a valid Zip Code to test the data connection. In our case, we will use the zip code 98052, Redmond, WA.

Figure 16. Insert the MSN Weather data as a Multiple Item View. This will show both the current weather and the forecast.

To display the weather feed, we will insert the data as a Multiple Item View. This will show us both the Current conditions and the Forecast. In the Data Source Library, click on the weather source > Show Data and then choose the item/description field > Insert Selected Fields as… > Multiple Item View (see Figure 16). Again, the “Format as:” selection will need to be adjusted. Set the format to Rich Text (using the OOUI).

Figure 17. Again, the inserted data needs to be formatted differently to appear correctly. Choosing Rich Text format will show the weather feed correctly.

We now have all of the data sources configured and displayed in three different Data Form Web Parts (DFWP) on our .aspx page (see Figure 18 below).

Figure 18. The page now contains all of the data, both external and internal.

Step 3. Connect the different parts of information

The goal for our mashup is to show data unique to each recruit (and be able to select which recruit’s data to display). Right now, we have static data for one recruit, and external data from whatever example we typed into the server-side script URLs upon configuration. To solve our problem, we will use a filter with a query string to pick an individual recruit along with Web Part Connections to link the three Web Parts.

Start with the contact list data from Recruits. Click on the list Web Part > OOUI > Filter:. A dialog titled “Filter Criteria” appears (Figure 19). Follow these steps:

Click “Click here to add a new clause”
Field name = Full Name
Comparison = Equals
Value: choose Create a new parameter (opens another dialog called “Data View Parameters”)
Parameter Source = Query String
Query String Variable = recruit
Default Value: pick a name within the Recruits list (if you don’t pick one, the web part will be blank and difficult to work with)
Click OK
Click OK

Figure 19. Filter the Recruits list web part to show the data for the recruit passed in the URL query string.

Figure 20. Create the query string parameter to use in the filter.

At this point, we could preview the page and see contact information, along with the twitter.com and MSN Weather data for the examples that were used to configure them. Changing the URL query parameter to different names would show us the unique contact info for those names (the URL is the page URL with the following attached to the end: “?recruit = [name]”). But, even though the recruit data changes, the twitter and weather info would not. Next, we need to connect the recruit with their twitter info and the weather for their location.

To connect the twitter source to the email address column of the Recruit list, we will use Web Part Connections. Click on the twitter Web Part > OOUI > Web Part Connections… (Figure 21). A dialog with title “Web Part Connections Wizard” will appear. Follow these steps (Figure 22).

Choose the action… = Get Parameters From
Click Next
Click Next (for Connect to a Web Part on this page)
Target Web Part = Recruits
Target action = Send Row of Data To
Under “Columns in Recruits” click <none> on the same row as email under “Inputs to Twitter” and select E-mail Address.
Click Next
Click Next
Click Finish

Figure 21. Use Web Part Connections to send the recruit's email address to Twitter.

Figure 22. Follow the wizard, connecting the REST sources to the Recruits list.

The Twitter Web Part is now linked with the Recruits Web Part. A box should appear at the top of the page labeled “SPWebPartManager – WebPartManager”.

The MSN Weather Web Part can be connected in the same way. Click on the MSN Weather Web Part > OOUI > Web Part Connections… to open the Web Part Connections Wizard.

Choose the action… = Get Parameters From
Click Next
Click Next (for Connect to a Web Part on this page)
Target Web Part = Recruits
Target action = Send Row of Data To
Under “Columns in Recruits” click <none> on the same row as wealocations and select ZIP/Postal Code.
Click Next
Click Next
Click Finish

Ta Da! All of the Web Parts are now connected to each other. When the page URL is submitted, the server draws the Recruit name from the URL, displays that recruit’s information, sends the recruit’s email address to Twitter and their zip code to MSN Weather, receives the data from both services, and displays all of the unique information on the page! Figure 23 displays what the page looks like in the browser.

Figure 23. With all of the data sources inserted and connected, this is what the page looks like before formatting. Changing the name in the query string of the URL displays unique information for that recruit.

Step 4. Format as desired

The page can now be formatted to any degree, making the page easy to use and look good. The first thing that we would do would be to attach a Master page to help the page fit in with the rest of the site. This can be done easily by clicking Format > Masterpage > Attach Masterpage… > OK. Next, text can be formatted, colored, or moved around. Figure 24 shows an example of what the final result could look like.

Figure 24. The final mashing.aspx page with a master page and some formatting.

Hope you enjoyed it! Coming up soon, Part 2: the map...

Locking Down SharePoint Designer

spdblog — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:18:00 GMT

Hello all, Stephen here again – I’m a writer for SharePoint Designer. As you know, SharePoint Designer 2007 is a powerful tool for editing SharePoint sites — so powerful, in fact, that you likely have scenarios in your organization where you want to control where and how people can use SharePoint Designer 2007.

With this post, I’ll try to answer a very common question: “How can I lock down SharePoint Designer in my organization?” And I’ll try to answer the flip side of this question, which arises in an environment where SharePoint Designer has been locked down and the user asks: “Why do I see this message when I attempt to edit a site in SharePoint Designer?”

Options for locking down SharePoint Designer

The following table outlines the various ways in which you can lock down SharePoint Designer in your organization. Some of this information has been previously published in various venues (Office Online, TechNet, MSDN, Knowledge Base, etc.), but I thought it would be helpful to pull it all together for you.

SCOPE	OPTION	PERMISSIONS REQUIRED TO ENABLE OR DISABLE
At the server level per site definition	ONET.XML — Prevent all users from opening all sites created from a specific site definition (such as all team sites or all publishing sites) by modifying ONET.XML for that site definition.	Server administrator — You must have an administrator account on the server to modify this file.
At the Web application level for all users	Permissions in Central Administration — Prevent all users from opening or editing all sites in a Web application by removing the permissions in Central Administration.	Site Collection Administrator — You must be a Site Collection Administrator to add or remove permissions in Central Administration.
At the Web application level per user or group	Policy in Central Administration — Prevent specific users and groups from opening or editing all sites in a Web application by removing the permissions in Central Administration.	Site Collection Administrator — You must be a Site Collection Administrator to manage permission policies in Central Administration.
At the site level per user or group	Site permissions — Prevent specific users and groups from opening or editing sites at the site level by removing the permissions from their permission level. Site permissions cannot override permission settings in Central Administration.	Site owner — You must have the Manage Permissions permission to configure site permissions. In SharePoint Server 2007, by default only the Full Control and Manage Hierarchy permission levels include this permission.
At the site level per user or group (not a security feature)	Contributor Settings — Guide trusted users toward performing the right tasks in the right place by disabling features and UI in SharePoint Designer 2007. Contributor Settings cannot override permission settings at the site level or in Central Administration.	Site owner — You must have the Manage Permissions permission to turn Contributor Settings on or off. In SharePoint Server 2007, by default only the Full Control and Manage Hierarchy permission levels include this permission.
Per computer or per user	Group Policy — Use policy settings to disable menu commands and their corresponding toolbar buttons in the UI of Office programs, including SharePoint Designer. You can also disable keyboard shortcuts. Settings can be applied to a specific computer or user.	Windows administrator — You must be a member of the Domain Administrators security group, the Enterprise Administrators security group, or the Group Policy Creator Owners security group.

For a visual overview of the various levels, see MSDN: Server and Site Architecture: Object Model Overview.

Permissions overview

For the above options that use permissions, whether at the site level or in Central Administration, there are three permissions that you need to consider.

PERMISSION	DESCRIPTION	EFFECT ON EDITING WITH SHAREPOINT DESIGNER
Add and Customize Pages	Add, change, or delete HTML pages or Web Part Pages, and edit the Web site using a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible editor.	Without this permission, you cannot edit files at the root of the site (such as default.aspx in a team site) or files that reside in folders outside of lists and libraries.
Browse Directories	Enumerate files and folders in a Web site using SharePoint Designer and Web DAV interfaces.	Without this permission, you cannot open a site in SharePoint Designer.
Manage Lists	Create and delete lists, add or remove columns in a list, and add or remove public views of a list.	Without this permission, you cannot delete libraries, lists, or list forms or views (such as AllItems.aspx) in SharePoint Designer. However, if a list does not inherit permissions from the site, the list permissions apply to that specific list. Note that by default, the Workflows document library does not inherit permissions from the site; you must manage these permissions separately.

Option 1 — Disable the Add and Customize Pages permission

If you are concerned about users editing files in a site, you can clear the check box for Add and Customize Pages. Doing this also clears the check box for one dependent permission, Manage Web Site.

When you remove these permissions, users can still open a site in SharePoint Designer, and they can open and edit pages that may be at the root of the site, such as default.aspx. But when they try to save these changes, they see this message.

Without the Add and Customize Pages permission, a user cannot save the edited page to the root of the site or to any folders in the site — for example, a user cannot save changes to default.aspx at the root of the site. But they can save the edited page to any library in the site to which they have permissions or to a location outside the current site. Remember that list permissions are separate from site permissions — in fact, these two sets of permissions have separate sections in the list of permissions. So preventing users from saving changes to files that reside outside of lists or libraries does not prevent them from opening the site in SharePoint Designer and doing things like deleting workflows from the Workflows document library or deleting an entire list. Permissions for these lists and libraries are managed separately (see the next section).

Here’s another consideration: If you have all of the permissions (the default Full Control permission level), you see all options on the Site Settings page (below, top image). If you do not have the Manage Web Site permissions (dependent on Add and Customize Pages), many options on the Site Settings page are trimmed away (below, bottom image). So take this into account when managing user permissions, especially at the level of Central Administration, because you may be preventing many people from performing key administrative tasks in their site.

Option 2 — Disable the Manage Lists permission

As mentioned above, if users can open a site in SharePoint Designer, they can — depending on their list permissions — delete content in lists and libraries such as workflows, list forms, or even entire lists. To prevent this, you must disable the Manage Lists permission.

After you remove this permission, when a user opens a site in SharePoint Designer and tries to delete a list (or a file in the list) that is inheriting permissions from the site, they see the standard “Access denied” warning message.

Note that this permission can be overridden at the level of a specific list or library if that list or library breaks inheritance. For example, the Workflows document library is a hidden library in the site that by default does not inherit permissions from the site. When you create a site, the Workflows library gets the same permissions configuration as the site, but any permissions changes that you subsequently make at the site level — such as disabling Manage Lists — do not automatically trickle down to the Workflows library.

To manage permissions for the Workflows library, open the site in SharePoint Designer >> right-click the Workflows library >> click Properties >> click the Security tab >> click the link “Manage permissions using the browser”.

Note that disabling Manage Lists for users also prevents them from adding columns to a list or creating public views.

Option 3 — Disable the Browse Directories permission

The previous options prevent users from editing or deleting objects in a site after they open the site in SharePoint Designer. You can also prevent users from opening a site in SharePoint Designer in the first place by disabling the Browse Directories permission.

Disabling this permission also disables four dependent permissions: two discussed above (Add and Customize Pages and Manage Web Site) plus two more, Manage Permissions and Enumerate Permissions.

When a user who does not have the Browse Directories permission for a site (or Web application) tries to use SharePoint Designer to open that site (or any site in that Web application), they see this message.

Then they are presented with the prompt for new log-on credentials. If the new credentials fail, they see this message.

Not an option — Disable the Use Remote Interfaces permission

Looking at the list of permissions, you may be tempted to disable the Use Remote Interfaces permission because it mentions using “SharePoint Designer interfaces to access the Web site” — a reasonable conclusion, but just don’t do it! This permission has a dependent permission, Use Client Integration Features, and removing this permission disables all SharePoint integration with Office programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

For example, if you disable Use Remote Interfaces, you’ll notice that the Edit in Microsoft Office Word option disappears from the item menu in a list or library.

Or when you try to view the version history of a document in Word (Office button >> Server menu >> View Version History), you see this message.

And all sorts of other cool features like workflow integration get disabled, so disabling Use Remote Interfaces is not the way to control access with SharePoint Designer.

At the server level per site definition — ONET.XML

If you are a server administrator, you can prevent users from opening sites in SharePoint Designer 2007 by modifying the ONET.XML file on the server. Every site definition includes an ONET.XML file, and changing this file will affect all sites based on that site definition. For example, you can modify ONET.XML for the “sts” site definition, which will prevent all users from opening in SharePoint Designer all team sites created from this site definition. There is no “uber-ONET.XML” file that controls all site definitions.

Changing ONET.XML is a global change that affects all sites on the server.

1) On the server, open Windows Explorer and browse to the folder that contains the site definition:

<Drive:>\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates\<site_type>\XML

Here are the site templates for a server running SharePoint Server 2007. Windows SharePoint Services has fewer site templates. Each site template has its own ONET.xml file.

Some of the folder names are a bit cryptic – for quick reference, this table maps them to site names.

FOLDER	SITE NAME
BDR	Document Center
BLANKINTERNET	Publishing Site with Workflow
BLANKINTERNETCONTAINER	Publishing Portal
Blog	Blog
CENTRALADMIN	Central Administration
MPS	Includes the site definition configurations for: Basic Meeting Workspace Blank Meeting Workspace Decision Meeting Workspace Social Meeting Workspace Multipage Meeting Workspace
offile	Records Center
OSRV	Shared Services Administration
PROFILES	Profiles
PUBLISHING	Publishing Site
SPS	SharePoint Portal Server Site (legacy - this template is obsolete)
SPSCOMMU	Community area template (legacy - this template is obsolete)
SPSMSITE	Personalization Site
SPSMSITEHOST	My Site Host
SPSNEWS	News Site (legacy - this template is obsolete)
SPSNHOME	News Site
SPSPERS	SharePoint Portal Server Personal Space
SPSPORTAL	Collaboration Portal
SPSREPORTCENTER	Report Center
SPSSITES	Site Directory
SPSTOC	Contents area template (legacy - this template is obsolete)
SPSTOPIC	Topic area template (legacy - this template is obsolete)
SRCHCEN	Search Center with Tabs
SRCHENTERLITE	Search Center
sts	Includes the site definition configurations for: Team Site Blank Site Document Workspace
Wiki	Wiki

2) Right-click the ONET.XML file for the site definition and open it with Notepad.

3) Add the following line inside the opening Project tag:
DisableWebDesignFeatures=wdfopensite

4) Save the file and close Notepad.

5) On the server, do an iisreset.
(Click Start, click Run, type cmd, click OK. At the command prompt, type iisreset computer_name /restart, then press ENTER.)

6) If you have a site of this type open in SharePoint Designer, close SharePoint Designer.
When you try to open the site in SharePoint Designer, you should see the following message.

For more information

Knowledge Base 940958: How to prevent SharePoint Designer 2007 users from changing a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site or a SharePoint Server 2007 site

TechNet: Special directories and storage locations (Office SharePoint Server)

MSDN: Site Definitions and Configurations

MSDN: Project Element

At the Web application level for all users — Central Administration permissions

In Central Administration, you can enable or disable permissions for all users and groups in a Web application. Managing permissions centrally like this can be convenient because a Web application can contain 150,000 site collections. When you clear the check box for a permission in a Web application, that permission cannot be assigned to any user or group in any site in any site collection in the Web application.

Browse to the Central Administration site. On the Application Management tab, click User Permissions for Web Application.

On the next page, you see the same list of permissions that you see when you manage the permission levels for an individual site (with one exception: in Central Administration there’s an additional permission named Use Self-Service Site Creation).

The effects of disabling specific permissions are discussed above, but in Central Administration the simplest way to prevent uses from editing sites in SharePoint Designer is to disable the Browse Directories permission so that they cannot open sites at all in SharePoint Designer — with the caveat that these people therefore won’t have access in the browser to all options on the Site Settings pages and won’t be able to manage permissions for any site in the Web application.

For more information

TechNet: Manage permissions for a Web application (Office SharePoint Server)

At the Web application level per user or group — Central Administration policy

The option covered in the previous section — permissions for the Web application — is a blanket setting that covers all users and groups for all site collections in a Web application. If you need finer granularity, you can set permissions for specific users or groups in a Web application. You do this by creating a policy for the Web application. Joel Olson’s blog has some good examples of when a Web application policy is useful.

And as Joel mentions, policy for a Web application is a way to centrally manage permissions and is different from an information management policy — auditing, expiration, labels, barcodes — that you use to manage data in a list or library.

Browse to the Central Administration site. On the Application Management tab, click Policy for Web Application.

Managing permission policies in Central Administration is much like managing permissions in a SharePoint team site. You can add users, configure permission levels, and then assign users a permission level.

Except the trick with setting permissions in a policy is that there are two check boxes for each permission — Grant and Deny. If you leave both check boxes blank, this means the policy does not explicitly grant or deny this permission, so it’s up to the discretion of site owners in the Web application whether users have this permission. If you explicitly grant a permission as part of a Web application policy, that user has the permission and this cannot be overridden by a site owner at the site level. Likewise, explicitly denying a permission prevents users from ever having this permission.

Your choices here for using permissions to lock down SharePoint Designer are the same as noted above. For quick reference, this table shows which default policy permissions levels grant or deny these permissions. The simplest path here to locking down SharePoint Designer would be to add a new permission policy level that explicitly denies Browse Directories (with the caveats about dependencies noted above), and then assign that policy to specific users or groups.

PERMISSION POLICY LEVEL	ADD AND CUSTOMIZE PAGES	BROWSE DIRECTORIES	MANAGE LISTS
Full Control	Grants	Grants	Grants
Full Read	Blank (neither grants nor denies)	Grants	Blank (neither grants nor denies)
Deny Write	Denies	Blank (neither grants nor denies)	Denies
Deny All	Denies	Denies	Denies

For more information

TechNet: Manage permissions through policy (Office SharePoint Server)

At the site level per user or group — Site permissions

A site owner can set permissions on a per user and per site basis.

If the site is not inheriting permissions:

· Click the Site Actions menu >> Site Settings >> Advanced Permissions >> Settings menu >> Permission Levels

If the site is inheriting permissions:

· Click the Site Actions menu >> Site Settings >> Advanced Permissions >> Actions menu >> Edit Permissions >> click OK >> Settings menu >> Permission Levels

At the site level, the same permissions are available to you, and they have the same dependencies noted above. For quick reference, this table shows which default permissions levels in SharePoint Server 2007 include these permissions.

PERMISSION LEVEL	ADD AND CUSTOMIZE PAGES	BROWSE DIRECTORIES	MANAGE LISTS
Full Control (Owners group)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Design	Yes	Yes	Yes
Manage Hierarchy	Yes	Yes	Yes
Approve	No	Yes	No
Contribute (Members group)	No	Yes	No
Read (Visitors group)	No	No	No
View Only (Viewers group)	No	No	No
Limited Access	No	No	No

The simplest guidance here is:

· To prevent users from opening a site in SharePoint Designer, add them to the Visitors group. Note that Visitors also cannot edit items or files in lists or libraries in the browser.

· To prevent users from editing a site in SharePoint Designer, add them to the Members group. Members can edit items or files in lists or libraries in the browser. They can also open (but not edit) a site in SharePoint Designer.

· To allow users to edit a site in SharePoint Designer but not perform site owner–type tasks (such as managing permissions), create a Designers group and assign that group the Design permission level. Users with the Design permission level can open and edit a site in SharePoint Designer, but they do not have the Manage Permissions permission.

Remember that permissions at the site level are overridden by permissions at the Web application level. Even if you assign a user the Full Control permission level for your site, that user will get denied access if the required permissions have been removed or denied in Central Administration.

For more information

Office Online: Permission levels and permissions

Office Online: Manage permission levels

At the site level per user or group (not a security feature) — Contributor Settings

You can use the Contributor Settings feature to enable and configure Contributor mode, which is a limited access mode in SharePoint Designer 2007. Users who open a site for editing in SharePoint Designer 2007 have access to different commands or features, depending on which Contributor group they belong to and what editing restrictions have been assigned to that Contributor group.

On the Site menu, click Contributor Settings.

Contributor Settings provides fine-grained control over which users can perform which tasks in SharePoint Designer 2007. But keep two important points in mind:

· Unlike permissions, Contributor Settings is not a security feature. Contributor mode is designed to be used in an environment where site owners are confident of their users’ intentions. Contributor mode helps to guide users in a particular direction to carry out their tasks, and this guidance prevents accidental changes to the Web site.

· A user’s Contributor Settings cannot override what their permissions allow them to do. Permissions are a security feature; Contributor Settings are not a security feature; if the two conflict, permissions always trump Contributor Settings.

To turn Contributor Settings on or off, you must have the Manage Permissions permission. In SharePoint Server 2007, by default only the Full Control and Manage Hierarchy permissions levels include this permission. So by default, only people in the Owners group can turn off Contributor Settings.

Finally, if a user tries to save a file to a location that is disallowed by their Contributor Settings, they see the usual “Access denied” message.

Contributor Settings can only be configured on a per-site basis, and these settings are stored in an .htm file. However, you can configure these settings on a temporary site, save the .htm file, and then include this file in a site definition by using the File element. This way, all sites created from this site definition will share the same Contributor settings.

For more information

Office Online: Introduction to Contributor Settings

Office Online: Use Contributor Settings as a site manager

Per user or per computer — Group Policy

In a Windows-based network, administrators can use Group Policy settings to help control how users work with the 2007 Microsoft Office system, including SharePoint Designer 2007. Administrators can use Group Policy settings to define and maintain an Office configuration on users' computers. Unlike other customizations — for example, default settings distributed in a Setup customization file — policy settings are enforced and can be used to create highly managed or lightly managed configurations. For example, administrators can use policy settings to disable user-interface menu commands and their corresponding toolbar buttons, and keyboard shortcuts.

You can create policy settings that apply to the local computer and every user of that computer, or that apply only to individual users:

· Per-computer policy settings are applied the first time any user logs on to the network from that computer.

· Per-user policy settings are applied when the specified user logs on to the network from any computer.

Group Policy is completely separate from both a permissions policy in Central Administration and an information management policy applied to a list or library. Group Policy does not control access to objects such as sites or site collections in a SharePoint deployment. Instead, Group Policy can disable commands and button in the user interface of SharePoint Designer 2007. For example, if you don’t want users performing resource-intensive tasks such as backing up sites during peak operational hours, you can use Group Policy to disable the Backup Web Site command in SharePoint Designer for specific computers or users.

Disabling UI requires that you specify the toolbar control ID (TCID) for the 2007 Office system controls. For Office 2007 programs that use the Ribbon, this download provides a list of TCIDs.

In SharePoint Designer 2007, you can get control IDs using the same VBA that worked in Office 2003. You can find steps and VBA code snippets at Office Online: Managing Users' Configurations by Policy.

Attachment

For quick reference, the spreadsheet attached to this post lists the TCIDs for all of the menus and commands in SharePoint Designer 2007.

For more information

TechNet: Enforce settings by using Group Policy in the 2007 Office system

TechNet: Disable user interface items and shortcut keys

Enterprise Management with the Group Policy Management Console

Office Online: Managing Users' Configurations by Policy

SPD Licensing 101

spdblog — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 01:44:41 GMT

We often get questions from you about pricing, licensing, purchasing, etc., so we decided to compile a list of issues we hear most frequently from you in these areas and provide you all with a high level guide for these questions. Most of this information is available across other Microsoft and Office sites such as the SharePoint site, Microsoft Support, and TechNet, but this summary can serve as a good reference. The content below is organized in the following areas: Trials, Pricing, Purchasing, Activation, Licensing and Support.

TRIALS

Everybody likes to try a product before buying it, so we give you two choices: test drive the product or download a trial.

One of the easiest ways to learn about SharePoint Designer is to test drive SharePoint Designer. We use Citrix technologies to allow you to test our products directly on some of our own servers, so all you need is a browser. It will take just about 60 seconds on a broadband connection to get you up and running, after which you will see the following screen.

Just click on the Office SharePoint Designer 2007 link and, less than second later, you will be up and running, ready to use SharePoint Designer. It really is that easy.

The second option you have is to download a trial version. This allows you to use the product for 60 days. As the Licensing and Support page explains, trial versions are for evaluation purposes only and the product goes into reduced functionality mode at the end of the trial period. When downloading your trial software, you will receive the product key that will allow you to install and activate the trial software, as seen below.

Be sure to read the Frequently Asked Questions about the trial versions.

PRICING

SharePoint Designer is licensed per desktop (just like Office). This is in contrast to the Client Access License (or CAL) and Server model that applies to SharePoint servers. Interestingly, SharePoint Designer is the only product in the SharePoint product family that is also available outside of Microsoft’s Volume Licensing programs as part of what is called FPP, or “Fully Packaged Product,” the retail SKU that ships in the cool plastic box. One important thing to point out is that, while the phrase “Volume Licensing programs” sounds as if it only applies to Microsoft’s large enterprise customers purchasing hundreds of licenses, the Open License program actually covers organizations needing as few as five desktops. Of course, you can always buy just one or two licenses as well.

As a product part of the Office family, there are two types of pricing that apply to SharePoint Designer: the estimated retail price and the upgrade price. As of November 2008, these prices are:

· Estimated Retail Price: $299.95

· Upgrade Price: $159.95

Products that qualify for the upgrade price include Microsoft FrontPage 2000-2002, Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003, Microsoft Works 6.0–10, Microsoft Works suite 2000–2006 or later, any 2000-2007 Microsoft Office suite, and any Microsoft Office XP suite. For more details, visit the official pricing and upgrade information page of Microsoft Office.

PURCHASING

Buying SharePoint Designer is actually very easy since you can buy it online.

Be sure to check out the system requirements. In addition, make sure to explore if one of Microsoft’s Volume Licensing programs is best for you, especially if you are planning on acquiring five or more licenses or if you need assistance from the Microsoft License Advisor or a reseller.

ACTIVATION

We ask you to activate the software to verify that your installation is performed with a genuine Microsoft product. We have tried to make product activation as simple and painless as possible with the Activation Wizard. Before we discuss any of the issues you may face during activation, let’s define “Reduced Functionality Mode.” Reduced functionality mode happens when a trial period ends or a product has not been activated before the end of activation grace period. In this mode, the product will function similarly to a document viewer, and you will notice that many menu items become unavailable. No files or documents are affected however, and you can easily get out of this mode by activating your product.

Here is a summary of the key KB articles related to activation that will be mentioned below:

· KB Article 828958 is a good set of resources on Microsoft Office activation. You can get to almost all of the KB articles from there, so it is a good page to keep handy.

· KB Article 927921 includes Frequently Asked Questions about Activation and about reduced functionality mode.

· KB Article 836178 helps with the “Invalid Product Key” error.

· KB Article 919895 helps with a variation of the “Invalid Product Key” error and other problems with the Activation Wizard.

For the rest of this topic we will focus on some of the most common issues we have seen from your support questions:

· “Invalid Product Key”: Ok, first of all, please double check the characters you type against your product key to make sure yours is not a simple data entry error!

· You have exceeded the Activation Limit: The Office EULA allows the license to be activated on up to two computers. You may encounter this issue when you are replacing an older computer and are installing SharePoint Designer to your new computer. In this case, you should call the License Activation phone line to obtain a code to activate the license. If you are attempting to install SharePoint Designer onto more than the number of PCs allowed by the EULA, then you will need to purchase additional licenses. Please note that we are not listing the phone numbers for License Activation here. The correct number for you is based on several factors, depending on whether you purchased SharePoint Designer in retail or Volume License, and more obviously, it depends on your region. If you are located in the United States, then a good place to start is in the Microsoft Office Activation page. If not, please visit the main Microsoft Office and SharePoint page for your region.

· “Invalid Product Key” error message when providing the key (pre-installed software or mixing products and keys): This problem is covered in KB Article 836178. When you start a 2007 Office program, you may be prompted to provide the product key, but after entering it you get the error message “You have not entered a valid product key. Please check the number located on the sticker on the back of the CD case or on your Certificate of Authenticity” or you may get the message “Please wait while activation wizard initializes” after which the activation process hangs. In these cases, the likely reason is a pre-installed copy of the software. The problem is solved by uninstalling the previous installation and reinstalling. Make sure that you are not entering a key for a product different than SharePoint Designer. Keys are assigned to a specific product and are not interchangeable. Also, double check that you are not using a key that has exceeded its activation limits.

· Reactivation required after significant changes to the PC: The Activation Wizard creates a hardware identification that represents the configuration of your computer at the time of activation. Over time, especially if you have made significant changes to the configuration of your computer since the original activation, the Activation Wizard may require you to reactivate. Please refer to KB Article 927921. Note that most minor changes to your computer won’t cause you to have to reactivate.

· “Invalid Product Key” error message when running the product: If you get the error “Your software cannot be activated because the Product Key you installed with is not valid. Please uninstall the software and reinstall it using a valid Product Key” visit KB Article 919895. This is a more complex issue that requires you to try several methods to solve the problem.

· You are unable to activate your license because of some other problem: The KB Article 919895 mentioned above also helps with a few problems that are not as common:

o The Activation Wizard disappears, or it does not start but you don’t get any messages.

o You get a communication related error.

o You get an error message stating that the “confirmation ID is invalid” after activating your product over the telephone.

o The product starts in reduced functionality mode and you get the error message “2007 Microsoft Office system is expired. In this expired state, many features of the product are unavailable until you convert to the full product. Click Convert to begin the conversion process now” after running the Office Activation Wizard.

o When it is not apparent what the reason is for not being able to activate your software, it is possible that the OPA12.DAT file, which holds the licensing information, has become corrupted and needs to be rebuilt. You can just delete the file to force it to be recreated. Make sure NOT to delete the OPA12.BAK file.

o Again, read KB Article 919895 if you experience any of these scenarios.

· You are unable to convert a trial version to a full product: Conversion is the process that happens when you finish evaluating the trial version and decide to purchase the full product. In this case, you are required to provide a product key that you have purchased. However, some trial versions of the product cannot be converted, so you must uninstall the trial version and then install the full product separately. For more information, visit the Microsoft Office Activation page.

· Issues using SharePoint Designer over Terminal Server: You may be encountering the message “This copy of Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer cannot be used on Terminal Server. Please contact your local authorized Microsoft retailer for more information.” This message occurs because SharePoint Designer requires the use of Volume Licensing key to run on a Windows Terminal Server. Refer to KB Article 924622 for more information.

LICENSING

Software licensing can be complicated. You may want to keep these resources handy and provide them to your purchasing department contact when considering SharePoint Designer.

· Microsoft License Advisor located at http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/mla/default.aspx

· SharePoint Product Licensing at http://www.microsoftvolumelicensing.com/userights/ProductPage.aspx?pid=123: This page includes comprehensive information about SharePoint licensing. The page also includes some of the changes relevant to those of you with licenses of SharePoint Designer interested in using FrontPage, or to those of you interested in the Software Assurance migration path for FrontPage 2003.

SUPPORT

Support for SharePoint Designer is available over email, online, or over the phone. Use the following site to get support for SharePoint Designer in your region.

· Support Site, located at http://support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx?rdpath=1&gprid=11677

WRAP UP

There you have it. Again, you can download this information as a Microsoft Word document here.

Page Versioning v2

spdblog — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 02:44:03 GMT

Hello again, Eray Chou here. We’re hitting the tail end of this year’s conference season, and a question I’ve been asked a few times on the road is whether there are solutions or best practices for rolling back changes to page edits in WSS.

One best practice is to put pages into document libraries and turn on versioning. There are limitations to this solution, which I’ll get into shortly, but it is a quick and easy way to handle changes to page content.

To create a document library in SharePoint Designer:

1.) File > New > SharePoint Content

2.) Click on Document Libraries in the left pane and then select Document Library

3.) Name your Document Library, for example “Pages”, and then click “OK”

Next, turn on Versioning for that document library:

1.) Select the Document Library you just created in the Folder List.
Type Alt+F1 if the folder list is not showing, or click Task Panes > Folder List

2.) Right click on the Document Library and select Properties

3.) Go to the Settings tab

4.) Set the Use Version History option to either “Major and minor (draft) versions” or “Major Versions”. If you opt for the former, set the Make drafts visible to option based on your own preference

Now that your document library with versioning is set up, you can create and save new pages into this document library. Each subsequent save you make will create a new version, and if you make changes that you want to revert, you can roll back to a previous version of the page.

To roll back changes:

1.) Click on the Page you want to roll back in the folder list

2.) Right click on the page and select Version History

3.) Pick the version number to restore, and then click Restore
Note that restoring a version just copies the old content into a new version, so you can always restore your most recent page edits. For example, if I’m currently on Ver 3.1 and decide to restore Ver 2.0, I’ll get a Ver 3.2 with the 2.0 page content.

The Master Pages gallery for your site has this turned on by default. So you can take advantage of rolling back versions on master page edits without additional setup.

As noted earlier, there are a few limitations with this approach:

· This approach does not work for web parts in web part zones. When a web parts is in a Web Part Zone, it gets stored in a different table internally and doesn’t support versioning. This approach does work for web parts that are not in zones.

· We do NOT recommend drag-dropping default.aspx into this document library. The homepage of the site is controlled by a meta-info key, and it takes code to update.

· There is no need to use this approach on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Publishing sites. Sites using the Publishing template already have a pages library and have this sort of roll-back functionality on by default.

Calling a WCF Service from a SharePoint Workflow (using Visual Studio)

spdblog — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 01:33:41 GMT

Greetings all, Alex Malek here - I'm a member of the SharePoint workflow team. This week at PDC, I did a breakout session on how to call an external system from a SharePoint Workflow. Let's walk through what that process looks like!

My Setup:

Office SharePoint Server (Express Setup)
Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
- Pro or better is required for the SP Workflow Tools

Note: I've already gone and created a WCF Service called "EmployeeUpdate” that has a single Operation called "UpdateEmployeeDB"

Step 0: Create a new SharePoint Workflow

Click “New Project” in the VS File Menu
Under the "Office/2007" group, choose "SharePoint 2007 Sequential Workflow". I've called my workflow "SharePoint Workflow 1”

Make your way through the wizard, and pick a site to test the workflow against. Then click Finish.
You'll now have a blank workflow to work with.

Step 1: Add a Service Reference to your Project

The easiest way to work with a WCF from .net is to have VS create a “proxy class”, which abstracts all the service calls behind a nice interface. You can do this easily using the “Add Service Reference” feature.

In the "Project" menu, click "Add Service Reference".
Paste in the address for your service and click "Go".
Give your reference a friendly name and press OK - I've chosen "CustomEmployeeDatabase”.
Once the file dialog goes away, you’ll notice a new child in your project pane, called “Service References”. If your service changes at some point, just right click your reference and choose “Update Service Reference”

Step 2: Register this endpoint with SharePoint

Creating the Service Reference endpoint also adds a "App.config" file to your local project, with a "System.ServiceModel" element. However, SharePoint doesn’t read from app.config files, so for SharePoint to be able to call this endpoint, you need to copy that configuration data to your local web.config.

Open web.config in VS for editing. You can find the file in the "\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80" directory, where 80 corresponds to the port of your SharePoint application.
Copy the "System.ServiceModel" element from app.config into web.config. If you already have a "System.ServiceModel” element, you’ll need to merge the <Bindings> and <Client> elements in manually.
To complete your changes, open a windows command window (Start/Run/cmd.exe) and type "iisreset", which will cycle the sharepoint web application, so it can pick up the web.config changes.

Step 3: Use a Code Activity to call the WCF service endpoint

Since SharePoint is built on .net 3.0, it is not supported to use the new Send/Receive Activities that were added as part of .net 3.5. Instead, we’ll use a code activity to work with the Service via code.

Drag a "Code" activity to the workflow designer canvas.
Next, double-click the activity to generate the code handler.
You can new up the service proxy client by using the proxy class name you gave.

CustomEmployeeDatabase.Workflow1Client client = new CustomEmployeeDatabase.Workflow1Client("WSHttpContextBinding_IWorkflow1");

4. Since my service is local, I’ll use the default network credentials to interact with the service. You’ll need to modify depending how your service is secured.

client.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential = CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials;

5. Last, but not least, you can now call your operation, just as if it was a local function.

string result = client.UpdateEmployeeDB();
client.Close(); <- don’t forget to close your connection

That's it! You can now hit F5 to test your workflow.

Wrap-up

There you have it - calling web services from SharePoint workflows. If you run into trouble, double-check that you properly copied the configuration information from app.config into your SharePoint web.config.

Thanks!
-Alex Malek