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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.
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…
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.
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…
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…
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.
<object id=”o” classid=”clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000″ width=”600″ height=”370″> <param name=”movie” value=”http://apps.cooliris.com/embed/cooliris.swf” /> <param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” /> <param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always” /> <param name=”flashvars” value=”feed=http://cooliris.com/static/images/feeds/home/media.rss” /> <embed type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” src=”http://apps.cooliris.com/embed/cooliris.swf” flashvars=”feed=http://cooliris.com/static/images/feeds/home/media.rss” width=”600″ height=”370″ allowFullScreen=”true” allowScriptAccess=”always”> </embed> </object>
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!
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…
I was looking to display a generic users’ inbox in a web page on my SharePoint farm. This is typically a service mailbox that people need to dip into from time to time and also send emails from. Research provided a few pointers but did not provide the entire answer I was looking for.
The standard OOTB OWA web part is fine for displaying the root inbox, but is limited when trying to display sub folders and the ‘New’ button. For this you will need to display the full OWA page.
This is simple to achieve by amending the web part and adding ?cmd=contents after the mailbox of the inbox you want to be displayed (shown below).
Assuming you have access to the mailbox the whole OWA web page will be displayed on the page. More information on additional commends when displaying OWA pages can be found here.
Recent testing has shown a couple of querky things when attempting to setup an Infopath form to recieve data from a SharePoint 2007 list. It took a little working out but the following apply;
- SharePoint list items formatted as ‘Multiple lines of text’ with the column setting set to either Rich text or Enhanced Rich text, are not available in Infopath when pulled through a data connection. I only resolved this by setting the item column to Plain text.
- Data pulled through the data connection is related only to the SharePoint list default view. I was pulling information across from a calendar view and only a month’s worth of data was available. You’ll have to set the default view to an ‘All items’ view to pull across all the data.
The font used by default in emails generated by SharePoint Designer workflow is Times New Roman and can look out of place in today’s corporate environments. It appears that there are no obvious ways around this in the workflow gui.
Chancing my arm, I tried basic html to change the font type, size and colour, coupled with tages for hyperlinks and it worked a charm. I also came across this blog post afterwards which covers some of the same ground.
