Inside a Micro-ISV

So heres a tip, if you try to install SharePoint 2010 on Server 2008 R2 when you run the “Install software prerequisites” step it will fail.  It took me a little why to realize why, I first tried to disable my firewall, and then UAC, etc.  But nope, all you have to do is disable Internet Explorer Enhanced Security.  That simple, just goto “Server Manager”, scroll down a little ways to Security and there is an icon on the right that says “Configure IE SEC”, and just turn it off.  If this is going to be a production server, when you are done installing it is a good idea to turn this back on as to avoid any potential security issue.

Well thats simple right?  To bad the errors you get from the prerequisite installer don’t say anything, and getting an error 13 showing in your logs which translates to “Bad Data” is not very helpful either.

So with SharePoint you can write CAML based XML Queries to get data from a list, you can also restrict these queries to Views. But after having to troubleshoot an odd issue, I think I have found a rather interesting SP bug or very undesired behavior.

For instance, SPList.GetItems has two overloads:
SPList.GetItems(SPQuery)
SPList.GetItems(SPQuery, string ViewName)

So if I do something like SPList.GetItems(myQuery, myView.ID.ToString(“B”).ToUpper());

I would expect the query to return back with the columns of that view right? Wrong, in fact it doesn’t seem to run the query at all and it returns back all the columns. If I run it with just the query I get back 1 row.

However, and this is the kicker, if I do something like this:
SPQuery query = new SPQuery(myView);
query.Query = myQuery;
SPList.GetItems(query);

It works as expected? This is obviously incorrect behavior, now I am pretty sure I understand why it doesn’t work. I am thinking the ViewXML is not generated until after the query is bound to a view, but for the overload that takes a view name, that means that version is broken. I have SP1 installed, I am kind baffled as to why this is broken….

In SharePoint when you create a list the Column (Field) names of the list are XML Escaped, this means if you have a name with spaces such as “My Column 1″ you will get “My_x0020_Column_x0020_1″ but what’s even worse is that if you have two columns that exceed the maximum length, such as “My Column that is really long 1″ and “My Column that is really long 2″ even though those are unique when they are XML Escaped they exceed the maximum length and are therefore trimmed and given auto generated integer id’s appended to them so they will now appear as “My_x0020_Column_x0020_that_x0020_i0″ and “My_x0020_Column_x0020_that_x0020_i1″ which is very troublesome.

To avoid this, there is a trick where you can use shortened column names when you first create the list, then go back and change the field to your “friendly” name. SharePoint will keep your first column name and use that as its internal name and use your “friendly” name as it’s display name.

So that works fine but there are other known issues, for instance if you do a CAML Query and get a datatable back or you simply call GetDataTable on one of the Views you will get a DataTable back with the internal names as the column names instead of the friendly names.

To resolve this I wrote a simple little helper method that you run your table through before you bind it that fixes this issue:

DataTable table = list.GetItems(list.DefaultView).GetDataTable();
foreach(DataColumn column in table.Columns)
{
    column.ColumnName = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(column.ColumnName).Title;
}

So apparently when you add an item to a List in MOSS that is a date time field, and then retrieve it you lose some precision. I just spent a good deal of time trying to figure out why my unit test equality kept failing, well if I looked at Ticks for the item that was stored, and then look at Ticks for the same item I just retrieved it turns out a couple of milliseconds of precision were trimmed off. So since I didn’t care about Time in my case I only needed to compare the dates I used date1.Date.CompareTo(date1.Date) == 0 little snippet and it worked fine.

Something to keep in mind if you run into the same problem…

So I have been trying to figure out why a web template I have added using stsadm -o addtemplate would not show up using GetCustomWebTemplate API.

According to MSDN:
“Returns the collection of site templates for the site collection based on the specified locale ID (LCID).”

If I run the stsadm -o enumtemplates I can see the template listed. However, when I run the GetCustomWebTemplate() method I get zero returned. So out of curiiousity I switched over to GetWebTemplates() which according to MSDN:

“Returns the collection of site definitions that are available for creating Web sites within the site collection. ”

See a similarity there? In any case the difference is GetWebTemplates returns ALL of the WebTemplates and not just the custom ones. So guess what shows up on the bottom of this list? The template I just added…

But what really mystifies me is if I add the template through the UI in “Site Templates” it shows up for GetCustomWebTemplate(), this seems like a bug to me as the behavior is so different.

So lessons learned for adding custom web templates to MOSS 2007:

- Added through UI, you can use GetCustomWebTemplates OR GetWebTemplates
- Added through stsadm, you CANNOT use GetCustomWebTemplates, only GetWebTemplates

Need to do some simple things in SharePoint but can’t figure it out, such as getting the RSS Feed of a list?  Exporting a list to Excel? 

Here are a couple of solutions I came up with for MOSS 2007:

How to retrieve the RSS Feed link for a SharePoint List?

private string GetRSSUrl()
{
 string listFeedPath = “~/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List=”;
 
 SPList myList = GetMyList();
 string safeListID = GetMyListID();
 
 return String.Format(“{0}{1}”, listFeedPath, safeListID);
}
  
 private static SPList GetMyList()
 {
  return SPContext.Current.Site.OpenWeb(“/”).Lists["MyList"];
 }
  
 private string GetMyListID()
 {
  return Server.UrlEncode(GetMyList().ID.ToString());
 }

How to Export to Spreadsheet for a SharePoint List? 

private string GetExportToSpreadSheetUrl()
{
 string exportPath = SPContext.Current.Site.OpenWeb(“/”).Url + “/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=109&Using=_layouts/query.iqy”;
 string safeListID = GetMyListID();
 string safeListViewID = GetMyListViewID();
 return String.Format(“{0}&List={1}&View={2}&CacheControl=1″, exportPath, safeListID, safeListViewID);
}
 
private static SPList GetMyList()
 {
  return SPContext.Current.Site.OpenWeb(“/”).Lists["MyList"];
 }
  
 private string GetMyListID()
 {
  return Server.UrlEncode(GetMyList().ID.ToString());
 }
  
 private string GetMyListViewID()
 {
  return Server.UrlEncode(GetMyListView().ID.ToString());
 }
  
 //You have to do it this way or it won’t work properly…
 protected void OnLoad(EventArgs e)
 {
  btnExportExcel.OnClientClick = String.Format(“javascript: window.open(‘{0}’);”, GetExportToSpreadSheetUrl());
 }