July, 2011

SharePoint InfoPath: For the Application Presentation Layer Observe that in all the operations, the New, Edit, and View forms are automatically generated. The following is the screen shot of how the forms would look for an Employee external list. Figure 11. New Item Figure 12. Edit Item Figure 13. View Item Generating InfoPath Forms for External Lists Notice that all of the forms generated look like the normal out-of-box forms for a custom list. However, it is difficult to customize these forms. InfoPath is one of the solutions you can use to customize these forms. The following steps demonstrate how InfoPath forms can be generated. Start SharePoint Designer and then open the Department external list that you created. You can see that all the three forms are listed in the external list under Forms. Figure 14. All forms are listed To generate InfoPath forms for all three operations, from the List Settings ribbon menu under Design forms in InfoPath Designer...

Creating Associations In this section, you start by creating an association on the Employee table. When you generate the New and Edit forms on the Employee entity, you see that the Deptno field displays a textbox. The user needs to enter the Dept ID as shown in the following figure (these forms are generated later in this section). Figure 3. Edit form on the Employee entity In this screen, it would be helpful if there is an option to select the Departments available. To achieve this, you can create an association. In the following discussion, you see what the edit form will look like. Later, you generate the InfoPath forms. To create an association it must be created on the master table (the Department Entity table). Step 1: Create a stored procedure that returns the Employee details specific to a Department. Make sure that it returns the same set of parameters as that the other CRUD operations return or pass in or, as stated previously, the forms may not be generated...

Manipulating Data in Lists and Libraries In this part of the series, you perform item manipulation operations on a list. If you remember from Part 2, for any manipulation operation, it is a requirement that a FormDigest tag be referenced before you can perform these operations. The following adds a control to your container. <SharePoint:FormDigest runat="server" /> Add a New Item to the List Adding a new item to a list is fairly simple. The SP namespace of the client object model provides < Object >CreationInformation classes for various objects such as Web , List , ListItem , ContentType , FieldLink , Groups , User , Role Definition , and View to name a few. You can use these creation classes to construct the object definition and then use the native methods to create the object in SharePoint. The following code snippet adds a new Sales entry for an employee to the Sales list created in the previous post. In this case, the ListItemCreationInformation object creates...

This graphic shows the services, CFSIs (configured farm-scoped instantiations), and service instances on a hypothetical 10-server farm. Note the following things about this example: The translucent rectangles represent services. These services are modeled in the SharePoint Foundation object model with SP*Service classes. The darker translucent rectangles represent CFSIs ("service applications") that are modeled in the SharePoint Foundation object model with SP*ServiceApplication classes. The smaller, solid rectangles represent instances of services that are modeled in the SharePoint Foundation object model with SP*ServiceInstance classes. The Diagnostics Service has instances running on all servers (except the dedicated database server), but the object model has no SPDiagnosticServiceInstance class (because there is no need for one in SharePoint Foundation), so there are no sold rectangles for these instances. The Administration, Timer, Diagnostics...

Contributors : Anweshi Deverasetty, Ashutosh Mahamia This article is the outcome of a recent project, where I was involved in the development of InfoPath based forms with little or zero code. I would like to thank my Development lead Ashutosh Mahamia who helped me with the design of this application. Introduction There is growing demand and expectation as well in the field to be able to leverage the new features in SharePoint 2010 to create database-driven simple SharePoint solutions which do not involve a lot of customization, business rules, and validations. This article will help you to understand how BCS and InfoPath, together can supplement this requirement and facilitate database Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD)-operations based on simple applications with a good User Interface. The Challenge One of the key challenges in this approach is performance. If the number of records maintained by the application outgrows what the entities can handle, then it provides...

Retrieving Data from Lists and Libraries The SharePoint team did a great job in ensuring that there is significant similarity in the server and client object models with regards to their syntax and behavior. If you have developed in SharePoint by using the server object model, you likely noticed that most operations in the client object model are similar to the operations you perform when using the server object model. The following discussion demonstrates some common list operations that can be performed using JSOM. You may want to display the monthly sales of an employee and track them against the annual target sales. The sales target is defined based on their role in the organization. You want to provide a Sales Target View where management can view the current Sales achieved by an employee and compare it against its Sales Target. You select an employee from a list that displays the sales achieved by the employee. Finally, you want to show whether the employee is an "Achieved"...

If you own a Windows Phone and would like to have easy mobile access to the latest resources for SharePoint developers, take a look at the SharePoint Developer Documentation Feed Reader app for the Windows Phone. This free app delivers the contents of the SharePoint Developer Center RSS Feed to your phone and enables you to share and save any resource that you find in the feed. Florence Chapman created the app’s iconography and tiles, including the splash screen at left. The app provides four ways to share and store the contents of the SharePoint Developer RSS feed: Tweet a link Share a link by posting it to Facebook Email a link Store a resource in the app’s Favorites list The app also contains a simple video player for viewing SharePoint how-to videos. You can find the app in the Windows Phone Marketplace by following this link (either on a Windows Phone browser or on a Windows computer on which the Zune software has been installed): http://bit.ly/sharepointdevreader .

Making your Code Ready for JSOM The previous post described how the JSOM model works. This post discusses how to prepare Visual Studio to provide support for JSOM and how to load the JSOM scripts before accessing the object model. Preparing your Environment for JSOM If you are using Visual Studio 2010 as the environment for developing with JSOM, you can use the following procedures to improve your development experience. Intellisense for JSOM You can enable Intellisense for JSOM to load the object model properties in the VS IDE. If you want to use JSOM as inline in an application page, you can enable Intellisense by adding the following references to the PageHead content placeholder of your page. <% #if SOME_UNDEFINED_CONSTANT %>                    <script type="text/ecmascript" src="/_layouts/SP.core.debug.js" />            ...

There are recent customer questions about .NET Framework support in SharePoint. For example, there is this question in the SharePoint 2010 forums, as well as several customer questions at SharePoint booth at TechEd. SharePoint 2010 does not support access from .NET Framework 4 or being run in a .NET Framework 4 app domain. If you must support the .NET Framework 4, we recommend that you develop a web service that uses the .NET Framework 4 and then connect to it from SharePoint. All server-side customizations directly for SharePoint 2010 still need to be either the .NET Framework 3.5 or the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. For more information, see the following MSDN Library topics. Requirements for Developing SharePoint Solutions How to: Set the Correct Target Framework and CPU   However, you can use Silverlight 4 and Silverlight 5 against the SharePoint client object model. For more information, see the following MSDN Library topics. Integrating Custom Silverlight 4 Applications with SharePoint...

The is the first of a four-part series of blog posts that describe the JavaScript client object model also known as JSOM. They describe how JSOM works and what files are required for loading JSOM scripts. It also provides a walkthrough of various access and data manipulation operations that can be performed using JSOM. About the ECMA Script Object Model also Known as JSOM SharePoint developers have been limited to coding on the server-side since SharePoint’s inception. SharePoint 2007 provides developers with a robust server-side API that allows for the manipulation of virtually any object in the platform. However, support for accessing SharePoint data from the client is limited to the use of various Web services. The Web services do provide access to the object model but their scope is limited and developers have to either constrain their goals or rely on external API’s, such as JQuery, when dealing with scenarios such as the manipulation of SharePoint data after a page has been loaded...

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch is the newest edition to the Visual Studio family that drastically simplifies the way you build data-centric business applications that can be easily deployed to the desktop or the Azure cloud. LightSwitch will release on July 26th. For more information on LightSwitch and what it can do for you see: Visual Studio LightSwitch | Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Developer Center on MSDN LightSwitch makes it easy to interface with desktop resources and other applications like Microsoft Office in order to create rich data-centric (data entry) style applications. These applications can be deployed locally on a single machine, deployed to any IIS server, or hosted in Azure. LightSwitch takes care of all of the plumbing you need in a typical n-tier data-centric application and focuses you on just the business requirements. The only code you write is the code only you could write – the business rules. One of the great features of LightSwitch is that it lets...

This diagram shows where supported extensions fit into the PerformancePoint Services architecture. The front-end web server hosts custom editors, web services, and other web applications, and the back-end application server hosts custom renderers, providers, and scorecard transforms. For more information, see Development Scenarios with PerformancePoint Services , PerformancePoint Services Architecture , Getting Started with PerformancePoint Services , and Fundamentals of PerformancePoint Services .

Using the LINQ to SharePoint provider to read and write data poses a dilemma: queries run faster if the object change tracking system has been turned off for the Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.DataContext object that represents the website, but if it is turned off, you cannot write data to the website’s lists. Moreover, you cannot change the value of the DataContext.ObjectTrackingEnabled property between true and false as you switch between writing-to and querying the lists: once a query has been executed with the ObjectTrackingEnabled property set to false, it cannot be set to true again. You can, however, have two distinct DataContext objects that represent the very same website. This enables you to disable the object change tracking system for one object and use it solely for querying. Of course, you would leave the property enabled (the default) on the other object and use that object solely for write operations on the lists. The following code illustrates how to do this. DataContext dc...

SharePoint localization consists primarily of translating the text in the user interface based on a given culture or language. This translation relies on resource files available to the system. To localize a solution, you remove hard-coded strings from the code and abstract them into resource files. Type of Resource Files In SharePoint, there are two types of resource file: provisioning resources, used during provisioning of sites and features, and runtime resources, used by the ASP.Net framework during runtime. The first type of resource files, leveraged by SharePoint during provisioning, resides at either of the following locations: · $ SharePointRoot $\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\< FeatureName >\Resources\ · $ SharePointRoot $\Resources\   Note The use of these locations for resource files depends on the level of sharing required in your solution. If the resource files are specific to a feature, they will reside under the specific feature directory. If the resource files are shared...

For your holiday weekend reading, the SharePoint 2010 SDK has been updated with new documentation and code samples, in addition to the usual addition of whitepapers, technical articles, and developer centers updates. Have a safe and happy Canada Day or Independence Day holiday.   Published on MSDN – June 15-30, 2011 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Content SharePoint SDK and Developer Guide content July 2011 refresh for SharePoint SP1 (online)! SharePoint 2010 SDK New Developer Content for SharePoint Foundation 2010 New Developer Content for SharePoint Server 2010 And also see: Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 (white paper) Technical articles   Opening a SharePoint 2010 Modal Dialog Box from an InfoPath Form   Provided by: Vivek Soni | Review coordinator: Don Lundman | Editor: Tonda Kiffin Working with Search Alerts in SharePoint 2010   Provided by James Fort | Review coordinator: Jo-Anne Stamerjohn | Editor...