The Black Knight Sings

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A user wanted some guidance on how to implement a cascading dropdown in SharePoint. The following will show a simple example of how to implement that as a user control which has properties for selecting a list, a choice field in that list for the first dropdown and a field for which all appropriate values are shown in the second dropdown

A client wanted to place a SharePoint calendar on a publishing page and have it configured such that when you clicked an event the full details showed up at the top of the page, and searching for calendar items should also put you at this page.

Sounds easy just put the calendar view on the page and set the calendars display form to be that page. But setting the display form to be the publishing page puts the ID of the calendar item in the URL of the publishing page which then confuses SharePoint as it thinks it has to lookup that id in the Pages list.

The solution is to introduce a page as display form which the redirects back but with the ID of the calendar item as a querystring parameter with another name than ID.

In my last post I described how to redirect to a publishing page in order to use it as display form for a calendar.

It caused the problem of having to look up the right instance of the calendar event (in case of recurrence) ourselves. If we just implement an ordinary display form SPContext does the lookup for us.

I poked around in the SDK to find a method which could look up an item from a list based on the RecurrenceID, but without any luck. I knew SPContext did this so I fired up Reflector to see how SPContext did this and found GetInstanceItem which did what I wanted, but tightly coupled to the SPContext's current List and then it was also a private method.

Despite the DRY principle I had to reimplement the same function.

If your company has very strict requirements on version numbering and want the comments to each of these versions to be correct, then you may run into a problem if you store the documents in SharePoint.

The version comment is determined when you check in your document, and after the checkin there is no supported way to change these comments.

If you really need to change the comments of a document and are willing to go the unsupported way of changing the content database directly then this little program can do the work for you:

Hi, my name is Per Jakobsen

I'm currently working as Senior Consultant specializing in ASP.NET and SharePoint for Kraftvaerk which is a small danish consultancy firm specializing in web technologies.

I also have a part time job as Instructor for DevelopMentor where I'm teaching the Essential SharePoint for Developers course.

My background goes all the way back to the stone age of computer programming.

• I started as a COBOL programmer on a mainframe computer
• Entered the new age with 4th generation languages (ADABAS/NATURAL) which was supposed to save the world
• Got into PC programming in Pascal, C++, Paradox and dBASE
• Further along to client/server programming using Paradox and PowerBuilder against Oracle and Sybase
• Took the deep dive into Embedded ANSI C programming
• And finally as a natural progressing ended in my current position with .Net programming with a focus on SharePoint

On the personal plane I'm married to Sussie and am stepdad to Nicklas, who in turn is stepdad to Bella Nova, which then makes me stepgrandstepdad.

In my spare time I'm playing Bridge when I'm not sitting in front of the computer or reading computer related books on my REB1200 ebook.