Create Site Collections from Custom Site Templates

In SharePoint 2010 creating templates from sites is as simple as a few clicks. Using that template to create new site collections is a bit more involved. The standard approach goes something like this; download the newly created template, in central administration create a new site collection without specifying a template, navigate to the new site collection, when prompted for the site template upload your custom template. The problem with this approach it's too repetitive if you're going to create a lot of sites and site collections.

What I wanted to do was to select the template to create new sites and site collection just like the builtin ones. To do this you need to understand what's going on when you create a site template from the SharePoint interface. It's a solution file so we can rename it to a .cab file and take a look inside. Along with the manifest.xml file, there are folders for; ListInstances, Modules, PropertyBags, and WebTemplate. The webtemplate folder is the giveaway, what has been created for us is a definition for a webtemplate. The webtemplate folder contains a feature with a scope of "Site" that needs to be changed to a scope of "Farm".

That's it, this webtemplate can now be used to create site collections from central administration, after installation of coarse.

The steps; create the template, download the template, rename the template to .cab, extract the .cab file to a folder, modify the feature xml, convert folder back to .cab, rename to .wsp, add and deploy the solution. To convert the folder back to a cab file I used TUGZip.

Disable ASP:Button onclick

A common requirement is to disable a button after it's been clicked. It can be accomplished by modifying two properties of the asp:button control. First, set the UseSubmitButton to "false". Second, modify the OnClientClick property to include "this.disabled=true;". These two settings will work in most cases. A problem will crop up if client side data validation is being used. The button will remain disabled and the user will not be able to click the button again. If you're using .Net validation controls you will need to check Page_ClientValidate() and then disable the button. 

<script type='text/javascript'>
   function disableBtn(control) {
     if (typeof Page_ClientValidate == 'function') {
        if (Page_ClientValidate()) { control.disabled = true; }
     }
     else
     { control.disabled = true; }
   }
</script>

<asp:Button runat="server" ID="btnSubmit" OnClientClick="disableBtn(this);" UseSubmitBehavior="false" OnClick="btnSubmit_Click" Text="Submit" />

SharePoint People Picker Limit Selection

By default, the people picker will let a user select anyone visible to the picker. This is not always an ideal situation. Luckily, there are a couple of ways to easily limit what the user can select from.

First, if you need to limit selection to site collection users, you can use an stsadm command

stsadm -o setproperty –url http://sitecollectionURL
       –pn peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection –pv yes

There are a couple of other options to limit selection that involve setup in active directory. They can be found here; Keep it Simple!
Peoplepicker: Stsadm properties


Second, customize the people editor control with the SharePointGroup property. I've found this solution very helpful in customizing input screens as it gives really fine grained control over an individual field. The field below will only allow selection from "SomeGroup".

<SharePoint:PeopleEditor ID="plpEdit" runat="server" SharePointGroup="SomeGroup" />

SharePoint People Picker Multiple Domains

The people picker is an important part of a SharePoint farm. Making sure that the correct users are available for selection is key. Issues almost always show up in farms where multiple domains need to be available for selection. The fix is a couple of stsadm commands, these commands work in SharePoint 2007 and 2010. 

By default, the application pool identity is used to search active directory. If the account does not have the correct permissions, you will need to encrypt the password for the account that will be used to search that domain. This account needs to be noted for password changes!

Set the encryption key (run on each WFE)

stsadm -o setapppassword -password  *********

Set the domains that should be searched  (run on one WFE per web application)

stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadforests 
       -pv domain:domain1;domain:domain2,domain2\account,password 
       -url http://webapp

A more detailed discussion can be found here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/joelo/archive/2007/03/08/cross-forest-multi-forest-configuration-additional-info.aspx

Visual Studio 2010 Code Snippets

Code snippets are a great way to speed up development time. In this post I'll go through a simple way to create your own code snippets. I'll be creating a snippet to log to the 14\LOGS files.

Open a Visual Studio project and add a new xml file. Make sure to save it with a .snippet extension.

Right click in the new xml file,  select Insert Snippet and double click on snippet. The xml below will be inserted for you.

Fill in the values you would like for these tag. The most important is the shortcut - its what will start intellisence for you.
    <Title>SharePoint Logging</Title>
    <Author>Me</Author>
    <Shortcut>SPLog</Shortcut>
    <Description></Description>

Choose what type of snippet you want either SurroundsWith or Expansion, I'm using expansion here.
    <SnippetTypes>
      <SnippetType>SurroundsWith</SnippetType>
      <SnippetType>Expansion</SnippetType>
    </SnippetTypes>

Now enter what you would like to replace in instances of the snippet. Here the component name to be logged changes. If there are more replacements needed, add more Literal tags.
    <Declarations>
      <Literal>
        <ID>Component</ID>
        <Default>CustomComponent</Default>
      </Literal>
    </Declarations>

Change the code language to CSharp.
    <Code Language="CSharp">

Enter the code to be inserted in CDATA[ YOUR CODE GOES HERE  ]
  <![CDATA[
  SPDiagnosticsService.Local.WriteTrace(0,
                    new SPDiagnosticsCategory("$Component$", TraceSeverity.Unexpected, EventSeverity.Error), TraceSeverity.Unexpected, ex.Message, ex.StackTrace);
  ]]>


Save the snippet to the default location "C:\Users\Administrator\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets" and your ready to try your new snippet.

Completed snippet file

<CodeSnippet Format="1.0.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">
  <Header>
    <Title>SharePoint Logging</Title>
    <Author>Me</Author>
    <Shortcut>SPLog</Shortcut>
    <Description></Description>
    <SnippetTypes>

      <SnippetType>Expansion</SnippetType>
    </SnippetTypes>
  </Header>
  <Snippet>
    <Declarations>
      <Literal>
        <ID>Component</ID>
        <Default>CustomComponent</Default>
      </Literal>
    </Declarations>
    <Code Language="CSharp">
      <![CDATA[
  SPDiagnosticsService.Local.WriteTrace(0,
      new SPDiagnosticsCategory("$Component$", TraceSeverity.Unexpected, EventSeverity.Error), TraceSeverity.Unexpected, ex.Message, ex.StackTrace);
  ]]>
    </Code>
  </Snippet>
</CodeSnippet>

Logging in Sharepoint 2010

Logging in SharePoint 2010 is a pretty straight forward affair. The code block below will write to 14\LOGS 

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration;

                SPDiagnosticsService.Local.WriteTrace(0,
                    new SPDiagnosticsCategory("CustomComponent", TraceSeverity.Unexpected, EventSeverity.Error), TraceSeverity.Unexpected, ex.Message, ex.StackTrace);

If you want to create your own custom logging component, the following two blogs will assist you.

http://blog.mastykarz.nl/logging-uls-sharepoint-2010/
http://www.sharepointproconnections.com/article/sharepoint-development/SharePoint-Logging-What-s-New-in-SharePoint-2010.aspx

ASP.NET Align Labels with Text

The simple task of aligning labels and text can become not so easy when you move away from using tables. In this example I'm wrapping the lables and textboxes in div and using a bit of CSS to produce the result below. The important bits are highlighted.

div{
      clear:left; 
      margin: 5px 0 0; padding: 1px 3px;
      width: 400px;
}
.input{
      display:block; float: left;  
      margin: 0 0 5px; padding: 3px 5px;
      text-align:right;width: 130px;
}




<div>
      <asp:Label AssociatedControlID="txtOne" CssClass="input" ID="label1" runat="server"  
      Text="Text One:"></asp:Label>
      <asp:TextBox ID="txtOne" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
</div>
<div>
     <asp:Label AssociatedControlID="txtTwo"    CssClass="input" ID="label2" runat="server"
     Text="Text Two:"></asp:Label>
     <asp:TextBox ID="txtTwo" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
</div>
<div>
     <asp:Label AssociatedControlID="ddlOne" CssClass="input" ID="label3" runat="server" 
      Text="DropDown:"></asp:Label>
     <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlOne" runat="server">
           <asp:ListItem>Choice1</asp:ListItem>
           <asp:ListItem>Choice2</asp:ListItem>
     </asp:DropDownList>
</div>
<div>
    <asp:Label AssociatedControlID="txtThree" CssClass="input" ID="label4" runat="server"  
    Text="Text Three:"></asp:Label>
    <asp:TextBox ID="txtThree" runat="server" Rows="5" TextMode="MultiLine"></asp:TextBox>
</div>
<div>
    <asp:Label AssociatedControlID="txtFour" CssClass="input" ID="label5" runat="server"
    Text="Text Four:"></asp:Label>
    <asp:TextBox ID="txtFour" runat="server" Rows="5" TextMode="MultiLine"></asp:TextBox>
</div>