Adventures in Consulting

FF at the End of a Content Type ID Kills Update Propagation

Valdon — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:25:14 GMT

I just spent a couple of hours tracking down an issue where our content type update code wasn’t working for some content types. The problem ended up being that one content type in the hierarchy had a content type ID that ended with “FF” (such as...(read more)

Creating Several List Instances in a Single Feature

Valdon — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:05:00 GMT

I’m not sure why I didn’t find this earlier, but I have always put a single list instance definition into a single feature. However, I recently had to put together several inter-related lists into a feature (no single list was useful by itself). The first...(read more)

Removing Extra Workflow Status Column in Default View

Valdon — Wed, 06 May 2009 05:25:48 GMT

When SharePoint starts a workflow on a list for the first time, it has this annoying behavior of adding a workflow status column to the default view of the list. Often times, this information is of no practical use for end users. Unfortunately, there...(read more)

Using Calculated Fields to Pad Numbers with Leading Zeros

Valdon — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:29:00 GMT

Just a quick note on one way to put leading zeros in a SharePoint list field using a Calculated Field. A client wanted a column to show the list item's name, followed by a number that was left-padded with zeros to two digits, like: Addendum-01 Addendum-02...(read more)

How to work around bugs in the SPGridView control

Valdon — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:11:15 GMT

SharePoint has a little known web control called SPGridView. This control can give you a SharePoint list-like view of data from any data source you can bind to (from a database or other sources). It also has features to sort, filter and group the data...(read more)

Using Both Field and FieldRef in InfoPath List Loses Data

Valdon — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:13:50 GMT

It appears that if you have both a Field and a FieldRef definition in your SharePoint list definition file that includes XML (InfoPath) field promotion, you can no longer update the field through the list; you must do it through the XML only. I ran into...(read more)

Getting To the Root (Well Almost) - Navigating the SPWeb Hierarchy

Valdon — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:13:36 GMT

Recently I was faced with the problem of finding an ancestor web (SPWeb object) of the current web. The ancestor needed to be the one just below the RootWeb. I quickly put together a solution that worked, but I later realized that it had massive memory...(read more)

Empty Active Directory Groups do not Show up for SharePoint 2007 Audiences

Valdon — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:27:00 GMT

I ran into an interesting issue at a customer site. They had dozens of newly created Active Directory groups, but only two of them were showing up when they wanted to create a new audience or specify one of the groups as a target for a list item. It turns...(read more)

Lookup Helper Methods

Valdon — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:43:00 GMT

Sometimes when writing custom code for SharePoint, you want to open the list to which another list field is referring (when it uses a lookup field). I had to do this to put the lookup field values in a custom menu item. Other times, you just want the...(read more)

Wrapping Text in a SharePoint WebPart Title

Valdon — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 03:29:00 GMT

An interesting bit of CSS formatting behavior that I ran across recently at a customer site. They wanted to be able to have long titles in some of their web parts, but it would always make the web part zone expand to fit the text rather than wrapping...(read more)

Accessing images and other binary files in blob fields through SharePoint BDC

Valdon — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 06:43:00 GMT

There are many applications that store binary data in blob or varbinary fields of a database, including pictures, Office documents, PDFs and other types of documents. Recently, a customer had the need to display, in SharePoint, an image stored in an Oracle...(read more)