The Black Knight Sings

---

Here is another small utility requested in one of the SharePoint newsgroups

It creates a tab delimited list of all the Site Collections in the current farm

The executable can be found here and the source code here

This is just a small Utility requested on one of the SharePoint Newsgroups

It uses the UserGroup web service to list all the SharePoint Groups a user belongs to in a specified Site Collection

It's a small console application which requires two parameters:
···The first parameter is the Url of the site collection including protocol (example: http://localhost)
···The second parameter is the full username including Domain (example: MOSSWORK\user)

This execuable can be found here and the source code here

When You’re running a medium sized SharePoint Farm you may often get requests from end users for a list of all the SharePoint sites they have access to.

I’ve implemented a small feature which provides this information as an application page, which you can access through a new menu item on the Welcome menu.

The implementation of this is quiet simple:

Add a menuitem to the Welcome menu pointing to our own application page:

The application page just contains a ASP.NET TreeView control and the following code:

Get Login of current user:

Loop through all SiteCollections inside RunWithElevatedPrivileges:

Skip Shared Services Administration and My Sites:

Process all child sites:

Check if user can view pages on this site:

Add site to treeview if user can access it or any of it's decendents:

A prebuilt solution package can be found HERE and the full source code HERE

I don't think that the built in pagers for SPGridView are the most useful and informative, so for one of my current projects I decided to implement two custom pagers

The first was XofYPager which shows the page numbers like this:

The second was SmartPager which shows the page numbers like this:

The use of these pagers are very simple just include the classes below and then before you DataBind() your SPGridView set the PagerTemplate property to an instance of one of these classes.

For one of my current projects I needed to show a SPGridView with data from a small list on the frontpage of the Intranet.

The list wasn't very small so didn't want to read if from the database on every hit of the frontpage, but on the hand it was so big that I couldn't cache it.

Now the big question was how to cache it.
If I used PortalSiteMapProvider then it'll always be refreshed when there was a change, but it would be hard to get the data into the SPGridView for displaying, sorting, paging and filtering.
If I on the other hand justed cached a DataTable, then it'll be easy to use in the SPGridView, but then I'd have to figure out when to invalidate the cache. It should be often enough that users wasn't annoyed with out of date data, but seldom enoughtthat it didn't annoy them due to the performance hit.

So I decided to combine the two and use the PortalSiteMapProvider to figure out when an update was needed and the DataTable for the real caching of the list items.

If you need something similar then here is my class, it doesn't deal with item level permissions, so if you need that you'll have to implement something different:

When you're branding a site using SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management, you really want to spend your time changing Master Pages and Page Layouts. But you often find that you spend a lot of your time editing your Feature.xml and different Elements.xml files especially if you have a lot of different Page Layouts with web parts for different parts of the site.
WCMexport is a small utility which can help you if you don't like doing all the editing of the xml-files from scratch.
With WCMexport you can use SharePoint Designer or what other tool you want to create the Master Pages, Page Layouts and Style Library Files on a development site.

By default the Overwrite checkbox in Upload.aspx is checked in WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007, but sometimes you may want to change this default.

MOSS junkie has a post on how to change that default.
But his solution has the downside of having to modify one of the standard application pages which is unsupported and may be overwritten by a upgrade

So how do we change the default without modifying upload.aspx?

Once again the <delegate> controls in the default masterpage can help us.
This time it's the AdditionalPageHead delegate we can use. This delegate allows you to add any number of usercontrols to the page header of every page in sites where your feature is activated.
So we add a feature with the following elements.xml file:

Sometimes you don't want your users to be able to search on your SharePoint site.
Part one of this is then to remove your site from the content source in SSP, but you probably also want to remove the Search box from every page in your site.

Fortunately SharePoint makes this very easy

The different version of SharePoint has different requirements for the Search box and the way these different serach boxes are implemented are using the Delegate feature of WSS
Delegates are controls in a masterpage/page whose content is determined by which Features are activated.
Each Delegate has an ID (SmallSearchInutBox for the Search box) and each Feature can vote for it's content by specifying an Control element.
For Delegates where AllowMultipleControls are false (like SmallSearchInputBox) the Control with the lowest sequence wins (25 is the lowest sequence used by OOB Feature)
So to disable the Search box all you have to do is implement a Feature which has a Control element with sequence below 25 pointing to an empty UserControls.
If you don't want to develop this yourselves you can just download my implementation which makes a Feature with WebApplication scope.
The source files are here and a precooked solution file is here

When developing Extranet/Internet site in SharePoint you often want to allow anonymous access and this works fairly well.
But there is one are where the out of the box experience fails regarding anonymous access and that is when you allow the users to download Microsoft Office documents. In that case IE/Office pops up a couple of Login dialogs, if the user cancels out of these the document opens as expected, but you really don't want the user to have to cancel a couple of dialogs to open your documents

The problem is that office tries to be intelligent and issues a Microsoft Office Protocol Discovery request to see how much the user is allowed to do, but SharePoint responds with access denied until the users logs in.

The solution I've found is to implement a HttpModule which rejects the Microsoft Office Protocol Discovery request if the user isn't logged in and this gets rid of the Login boxes
The essential code is fairly simple:

Many web-part developers are surprised to see that their web-parts are listed as available even though they have deactivated the feature which contains them

And the users are equally surprised when they then try to add the web-part only to see it fail because the code (and safe-control entry) has been removed.

The problem comes from the fact that deactivating a Feature doesn't remove files provisioned using Module and File entries