Gareth Davies

Person or group field not filtering correctly in a datasheet view

30/03/2011 in MOSS | Leave a comment

Been having intermittent issues in a SharePoint custom list when trying to filter it by one of it’s fields (a person or group field).

In this situation I had a field called ‘User’ which displayed a person. In the standard view this could be filtered fine. However the filter in the edit in datasheet view left out random ‘users’.

Initial investigations into permissions and user account did not produce anything. Then I can across these discussion points and tried changing the field value from ‘name’ to ‘user name’ and the filtering worked as it should.

Bath Half 2011

06/03/2011 in Races | Leave a comment

Just back from this race. Man was it cold to begin with, must have been nearer 0′C with the brisk wind.

Great race setup and all credit to the organisers – would definitely do it again even though I don’t really like doing loop courses.

Was aiming for around 1hr 47-50min with the training/injuries I’ve had recently and was more than happy with 1hr 44min. Had a tight calf which kept the pace down in the first 10K, bit it loosened up in the second half.

What Worked

Planning the kit out the night before – so much less stress in the morning

The usual – getting there early. This is my usual tactic, but I gotta say it works. Aim to get to the venue at least 1hr before the start.

Practising drinking while on the move. It is a bit of an art drinking while running and your stomach also has to learn to cope with it. Learn to have regular drinks when training and try and keep to this in the race.

What Didn’t

Ran a 12 mile training session a week before was fine at more or less race pace – great prep. However I tried a little too hard on a 10k session 4 days before and ended up straining a calf muscle. lesson 1 – take it easy the week before a race.

Drink stations. Never really taken this into consideration before. Took some of my own gels and used them up hoping to supplement it with stuff from the course – however it didn’t really synch up and spent far too long without the proper hydration.

Tried racing in the same kit as in training but ended up being too hot. Most of the outdoor training runs have been in the evening when it’s been colder. It’s a mistake I’ve made in the past and my rule of thumb is now to have a layer less than you think.

Looking forward to the rest of the season.

SharePoint Custom List Form on a large list is slow to load

05/01/2011 in MOSS, SharePoint Designer 2007 | Leave a comment

Needed to be able to change the view of a SharePoint list item for different sets of users. Started following the blog posts of Laura Rogers and Ian Morrish on how to display fields based on permission levels.

Created a new ‘NewForm, DispForm, and EditForm’ as directed but found that the ‘NewForm’ took a long time to load – too long (i.e. approx 20sec’s). This was on a big existing list of approx 20,000 items (did not try it on a smaller one to see if the same result happended). Both ‘DispForm, and EditForm’ loaded as normal.

Came across this forum post describing similar issues and tried the suggested solution (however bizarre!). Issue resolved…

Connecting multiple SharePoint 2007 list filters to a web part

08/12/2010 in MOSS, SharePoint 2007 | Leave a comment

There might be times when you want to put more than one SharePoint filter web part on the same page and use them to filter information displayed in another web part (list). Editing the page normally in the browser will only allow you to connect 1 filter to a web part (or send filter values to).

An example might be a page with a list (e.g. contact details) containing many hundred items. A simple way of filtering this list is to insert a filter web part onto the same page and use it to send filter values (e.g. Product) to the list to reduce the number of items displayed. You might want to reduce that list still further by having another filter (e.g. City).

To be able to connect 2 filters, open the page in SharePoint Designer and convert the list into XSLT. You will then be able to connect as many filters as you choose under web part connections.

Drilling into SharePoint 2007 Blog site usage

07/12/2010 in MOSS | Tags: MOSS 2007, Nintex Reporting 2008, Usage | Leave a comment

Been trying to figure out how many users were reading posts in various internal corporate blog sites. Having recently installed Nintex 2008 Reporting, I was confident of finding out this information.

A custom report pulled out the number of hits on Lists/Posts/Post.aspx in general but not the specific posts in question, like Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?=51

I contacted Nintex and they confirmed that Post.aspx hits are not audited, and as such “we don’t have that information in the Nintex Reporting data warehouse to be able to report on”. You can check this out by examining the SharePoint audit log for the blog site – Yep, no specific stat’s are recorded.

I guess for now the best I can do is run a custom report around the specific time a new post was published, but that would only be a generalisation. If anyone has got any better ideas I’d love to know…

Cardiff 10K 2010

12/09/2010 in Races | Leave a comment

Just ran the race and although I enjoyed it and the weather was great (almost too hot!), I’m disappointed in my overall time. Why? well a few lessons are to be learnt;

Don’t take 5K times as an indicator of possible 10K times. Even using the Runners World predictor, what should have been a possible 41:21min time (based on my recent 5K times) ended up a 45:02min one. It must also be said that these times on a treadmill are far faster than in outside conditions.
Don’t try and run a 5K time trial 4 days before. Didn’t feel the ‘buzz’ on the day – possibly due to the extra effort in putting out a new PB (for this season anyway).
Don’t eat (for me anyway) several slices of toast as a pre match breakfast – stick with porridge (stitch at 6K).

That said some of my other habits did work out well;

Moving as far as possible (as you dare!) to the start before the gun. Shuffling past all those slower runners REALY slows you down in the first 1K. Getting as far ahead has got to be beneficial. Looking back at my London Marathon – trying to get past all those slower runners takes it out of you.
Getting to the venue 1hr before the off, get’s you ahead in the toilet line.
Getting up at least 3hrs before the off, get’s things working earlier (if you know what I mean!).
Double knotting shoe laces works – saw at least 4 people stop in the race to re-tie theirs.

The only thing that spoilt the race was £1 for the baggage tent. It’s a bit rich when you’ve already paid £21

InfoPath 2003 Relink Forms post SharePoint 2007 Migration

23/03/2010 in Infopath 2003 | 2 comments

Just finished off doing a migration from a physical to virtualised 2007 environment. Most of the migration processes went according to plan, however there were some gotcha’s post migration especially with InfoPath 2003.

The migration moved the InfoPath form libraries easily enough but the template each form referenced was still linked to the old server. Here is the process to re-associate it with the new server;

Edit all your InfoPath templates in form libraries on the new server, changing any data connections in each template that pull data from the old server and re-publish.
Go into each form library > settings > advanced settings. Change ‘Allow management of content types?’ to Yes then OK. Go and open the ‘Form’ as shown below.
Select Advanced settings and then change the location of your template (if it references the old server).
Go back to the the form library normal view and select the ‘Relink Forms’ view. Select all the completed forms and then Relink. Sadly you will only be able to do 100 at a time. This will then relink all the forms with the correct template.
If you want to be able to select all 100 with one click see here.

SharePoint List – using [Me] filter on a column with AD user information populated from InfoPath (without code)

10/11/2009 in Infopath 2003, MOSS | Leave a comment

Issue

I needed to create an InfoPath 2003 form that pulled in AD user information (without code). This form was then to be published to a SharePoint 2007 library where a view was required that only displayed forms for the direct reports of line managers.

Resolution

I created the InfoPath form to pull in AD user information such as username, department and manager using this article. This works fine but the manager field is populated with DOMAIN\Username.

To strip out the “DOMAIN\” bit before the username use the substring-after command as detailed here. This gets the form looking neater, but when it is saved to the document library, the Manager field is created as ‘single line of text’.

I was going to use the filter [Me] on the manager field to show forms only where I was the manager. Thus showing me all forms relating to my direct reports. However you cannot filter using [Me] on this field type.

The workaround involves 2 steps;

1. create a new field in the library (call it say ‘line manager’) of the person or group type.

2. create a workflow in SharePoint designer to fire when a form is created to set ‘field’ [line manager] to ‘value’ [manager in the current item]. This is also described in greater depth in this article.

Now when a new InfoPath form is created, it is populated with the correct looking AD user information. This information is then used to populate an additional column in the list (this could also be hidden) which can be filtered using the [Me] switch.

Although this information is written elsewhere, it is in different places and this article pulls it together. Hope it helps…

Cooliris & SharePoint Picture Libraries

29/07/2009 in MOSS | 4 comments

Did some playing around with Cooliris after seeing it in action on EndUserSharePoint.com. Trying to get it working with SharePoint took a little playing around but I eventually got it working by using PicLens Publisher on their site.

After installing this and running it on a set of photos, I uploaded the output content from this into a new document library on my SharePoint site.

I then inserted a Content Editor web part onto a .aspx page and edited the source code (highlighted in red below) to point to the .rss file in the document library.

I finished off by creating a crossdomain.xml file, then inserted this into the root of the site via SharePoint designer. I then refreshed the page and the document library content was displayed.

Very nice, although as a lot of my users access SharePoint remotely (via Citrix Currently Presentation server 4.0) I won’t be putting it into action soon. Let’s hope it works better with XenApp 5.0!

SharePoint & Google Maps – Your Options

01/06/2009 in MOSS | Leave a comment

I’ve was asked recently about adding mapping information onto our intranet, making it easier for staff to locate company properties. Although there is a lot of information out there connected with using Google maps on SharePoint, there is a lot of variation in it’s use. Summarized below are really the 3 (free) options you have got.

Option 1 – Static map

Follow the step by step instructions here. This will display mapping information on the web page, but the location is fixed. For a slightly better option insert a content editor web part and copy across the code from here. This can be made a little more dynamic if you apply for a Google API key – which is fairly easy to do! and follow some of the instructions.

You will have to manually insert the location (lat/long) in the code, but it only requires modify access to the web page not MOSS server.

Option 2 – Map displayed by selecting location from a list.

But what if you want to display a map by clicking on an address in a SharePoint list. This requires a more complex solution than option 1. There may be other examples of this, but the best solution I found was here at AMREIN ENGINEERING AG. Screenshot of my solution below. Check out their other free web parts – some of which are particularly awesome.

The instructions are concise and (if your knowledge of MOSS is sufficient) relatively easy to implement. It will involve amending the web.config file and adding some dll’s – so access to the MOSS server is required.

The only downside I came up with was that you have to display the latitude and longitude columns in the list view on the web page.

If like in Option 1 you apply for the Google API code, the map is dynamic.

Option 3 – Like option 2 but with more bells and whistles

Option 2 might suffice, but you might want contact information to pop up when you click on the map pin, or for directions to the location to be an option.

In this instance, I found web parts/code at Codeplex to be a good place to start with examples such as adding a map to a contacts list. To display points and locations on a Google map and get directions to and from that point you might want to consider this. Although this solution requires a pretty good knowledge of installing wsp files and stsadm configuration commands.

Again these solutions require access to the MOSS server and my advice here is to try these out on development servers beforehand and know what each stsadm command does what.

Hope the info helps…