If you take a tour over to google or any other search engine to try and find the best way to filter a SharePoint list you will find many results that only provide partial success. If you want to accomplish the following then this walk through is for you.
filter a SharePoint list (using a TextBox)
filter multiple columns
only show a limited number of results on the page, however still have the filter apply to the whole list
Recently we needed to read an argument into a view so we could provide a more customized view when content was being displayed. After some research and testing we got things working although must of the online resources we could find only had a piece of the puzzle. Basically we’re looking at a five step simple process to get a view to read an argument from the URL. For the purpose of this blog post I will be looking in the URL for 1 to many Taxonomy: Term IDs.
Step 1:
Edit your block (the block that your view has created)
Under “Page specific visibility settings” put a new line under the existing entry with “mypage/*”
Now your block will still load when you pass additional URL parameters
Recently we discovered a interesting issue with SharePoint that will cause you copious amounts of grief if your not aware of this ‘functionality’.
What you may be experiencing:
my site seems to have broken permissions
administrator can’t make changes
I can’t seem to restore a copy of my site
nothing is working properly and there’s no errors in any log files
What is going on?
Basically your site has been locked. What!?! To fix this issue just take a peak below at “How can this be fixed?”.
What caused this?
A new feature in service pack 2 for Windows SharePoint Services (WSS 3.0) by default locks & unlocks your site when backups are performed. The problem is if anything fails your site will remain locked. This is in essence a good feature unfortunately there’s no obvious log or indications anywhere. A giant red banner on the administration site would be a simple and effective way to bring attention to this ‘feature’ so anyone trying to get things working again has some direction. Additionally the site lock feature when auto enabled or left on by the system should provide a clear list of the reasons this might occur so any individual monitoring a SharePoint site knows what to look for.
One of the following issues may be the cause to this ‘feature’ kicking in:
backup failed (as of Service Pack 2)
restore failed
there’s more reasons – feel free to add the in the comments!
As of service pack 2 for Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) if your nightly backup fails your site will be locked! In some cases you will see no errors in any logs and have no indication (depending where the backup failure occurred) that anything has failed. In the instance we ran into the backup successfully completed but failed to exit causing the site to remain locked with no error messages.
How can this be fixed?
To get the system back into a normal state simply follow these steps:
open Central Administration on your server
select “Application Management”
under “SharePoint Site Management” select “Site collection quotas and locks”
using the drop down titled “Site Collection” move through each site and check the “Lock status for this site”
change the offending site(s) to “Not locked” and click ok
Success!
Additionally if you’d like your site to remain in a normal state if a backup fails then you can adjust your backup script to include the following setting “-nositelock” when using stsadm.
Please let us know if you have any other tips or tricks related to these issues.
There have been a couple of high profile announcements about government institutions using open source products in place of proprietary systems.
One of the biggest announcement came from the White House and they have released some great new modules for Drupal. All three modules work well to fill noticeable voids and provide a better browsing experience. One module, “Context HTTP Headers”, allows developers or system administrators to customize caching for pages based on type. This means is that you can have your news pages cached for five minutes on a high traffic website and have your ‘standard content pages’ such as About Us cached for sixty minutes. Another module release is called Akamai and helps target scalability as well by enabling integration into a their Content Delivery Network. Another module called GovDelivery makes it a lot easier to send out tailored emails to the governments email list.
The White House also released one of the most desired modules for any developer who is working hard to build accessibility complaint websites. Dubbed “Node Embed” the module helps deliver rich content (photos and videos) with all of the appropriate meta data that makes them fully accessible by screen reading software.
The Bank of Canada has also made some contributions back to the open source community. They released three WordPress plugins that were developed for their website. The AJAX Scroll plugin adds a graceful fade in and fade out for next/previous links when a user is navigating content. Another recently releases plugin is called PBox and it allows a developer to create custom content widgets and standardize the display of the content within them. This is very useful as it helps ensure all information will have the same look and feel across a site.
The Bank of Canada has also released a WordPress plugin that helps remove the handcuff’s when it comes to widgets and customizing them. The plugin called XWidgets allows for a page-by-page customization of any widget which means you can have a news feed or any type of widget customized to fit any specific pages layout or design needs. This means you can easily have your about us page display a Flickr feed and the same widget could display a twitter feed on your contact us page.
All these announcements are great news for all types of internet users, from casual surfers, to content producers and developers. Its great to see political offices getting on board with open source and we hope that this is just the start to many more contributions from all levels of government.
What online government features would you like to see made available to the general public?
Building on our experiences over the years we’ve developed a list of key tasks required to complete prior to developers writing a single line of code. We hope these tips will save you some time on your next project.
1. Review everything
When it comes to any project its important to review all the material that your sales team and project manager are handing you. Make sure you take the time to sit in a quiet area and read through all of the material making notes as you go.
2. Ask Questions
Following up on the first task its very important to ask lots of questions. Even if the answers to every question is a simple yes, never underestimate the importance of asking questions and clarifying your understanding of functionality.
3. Review proposed technology
Anytime someone makes a decision to use a specific technology to solve a problem its always useful to review the technology proposed and ensure there are no missed opportunities. More often then not the person who is recommended the technology is doing so on tried and true past project successes. This however does not mean that new cutting edge technology wouldn’t be a better fit.
4. Talk with your development team
Even if you deployed every piece of functionality on previous projects it’s important to talk through what your going to be doing at a high level with your development team. It’s especially important to discuss functionality you’ve never deployed such as a twitter feed or other new technology solutions. Someone more often then not has a good idea to save you time, or recently solved a very time consuming problem with one of the technologies you’ll be deploying.
5. Plan your attack
Take the time to sit in a quiet area, think about how you’ll be developing this solution and then write it down! We can’t stress this enough as to how important it is to document what will be done first, second and so on. On top of that it’s important to have this information available to your project manager, after all he’s going to want reassurance you can hit and deliver on the clients time lines. Try using a gantt chart to create your plan as this is a simple yet effective way to dip your toes into this process.
6. Review your plan
Remember that even if you’ve spent two hours or six hours planning out what you’ll be developing first and second and what you’ll be developing last it’s important to review this with the project manager. They’ll be able to provide necessary feedback on concerns about client expectations and potentially bottlenecks you may not have considered.
7. Comp out functionality
At this point you should already have a design for your application however this design won’t illustrate every piece of functionality, and it’s not important to illustrate how a simple page will look before you get started. Any functionality that isn’t 100% cut and dry should be laid out. You can do this by hand, with many free layout tools or simply work with a designer to create rough composites that you can show to the client for sign-off.
8. Review everything with a team member
Take the time to review your plan and comps with another developer. It’s always easier to have a mistake or suggestion pointed out to you know before your 50% down the project. Have the other developer review your plan, your comps and talk him through everything so he understands what’s going to be developed without reading all of the information for the entire project.
9. Use pseudocode
Unless you’re the only developer in the world that doesn’t make mistakes or logic errors then this step is essentially for success. Layout your functionality in pseudocode being as detailed as possible. Overtime you’ll learn where details need to be very specific and where they can be a little less detailed. This process will help you stop logic problems within your code every single time.
10. Start coding!
By putting some planning upfront you’ve just saved yourself lots pain and suffering moving forward.
Good luck – we hope this will save you some time and ensure things move smoothly for you on your next development project. Please share any tips you have for improving the development process in the comments.
David Millar, Lead Developer Millar, as he is known around the office, is a rock-solid, workhorse coder. If anyone really understands what a chunk of code is doing it’s him. Family, friends, sports, and his wife are the most important things in life to him. He plays sports weekly and golf in the summer when he’s not busy hanging out with friends and family. Recently he got married to his wife Kate in a beautiful ceremony surrounded by friends and family on a perfect summer day. A humanitarian at heart, his positive demeanour is rattled most when “society makes decisions without considering more relevant information from the present”, and people “make self indulgent decisions that hurt society and everyone else”.
