Renaming the Title field in a list or site

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in a SharePoint installation is to dig down into the Site Columns and rename the Title column. At the time it might seem like the best thing in the world to do. The problem is that since the title field is hidden and included in every list in a SharePoint installation, you can have some unintended consequences. The next problem is that you will not be able to easily rename the column back to title. If you try to do this you will get an error message that says a column already exists with that name. That is because internally in SharePoint that column that you renamed is still called Title, no matter what you change the display name to.



The only way I have found to rename the Title column if you change it is to use SharePoint Manager. You can edit list columns in this program and rename the Title field back. I have not found any bad consequences by using this tool.

More Trouble with Incoming Email

Yesterday I happened to check an email enabled list and noticed that the most recent document added to the list was over 2 months ago. So I began tracking back and started with the person that sends out the emails that include the SharePoint list. She was still including the list address.

So then I sent an email to the list and logged onto the SharePoint server and watched the email arrive in the SMTP Drop box, and then disappear. Usually at this point, the email would have arrived in the list and the document should be there. It wasn't.

So then I begin hunting on the web and found a blog by Travis Lowdermilk. It explained the typical SharePoint setup but then towards the bottom in the comments I found someone that was having the same problem as me and when they changed the setting on the list to allow email from all users then their list worked.

So I tried it myself and the emails were getting dropped into the list. I am not sure what has changed in the last couple of months to change how that security trimming of the email-enabled lists works but for now I am ok with opening it up to all users since only one person in the company knows the address to send items to. I will be looking into this in the future and will find out if this is a bug from a recent update or what happened.

AJAX in SharePoint

I was surprised the other day at how easy it was to incorporate AJAX controls into my SharePoint installation. The hardest part is including all of the lines that are necessary in the web.config in order to get AJAX to work.

The worst Deployment Error Ever

The other day I got a call from someone out in the plant that they could not access our Timesheet program (written in .Net) from the Intranet. I walked out there to take a look since there were about 20 other computers that were all able to access it without any problems. I got out there and found the common deployment error dialog and clicked the more details button to get the full error and found this "Cannot handle redirect from HTTP/HTTPS protocols to other dissimilar ones." I had never seen this error before and so I searched for it on Google and found 3 links that dealt with the error but none of them were the same situation and none of them had a solution.



I ended up rebooting the machine and trying it again and everything worked fine, but I never did find any meaningful information about what the error really means or what could be causing the issue. The program works by clicking a link which goes to an ASPX page to validate that the user is inside our company and if they are it redirects to the .application file for the program. If they are not it redirects them to a page telling them they can't access the program from outside the company.



If anyone else runs across this issue, I would be interested to see if they find the cause of it or what they did to fix it.

Using Crystal Reports in SharePoint

Picture this:



You have a WSS 3.0 installation so you do not qualify for PerformancePoint to display your metrics. Is it a lost cause? Is there no way to easily display metrics for your company and deliver them to the people they need to go to?



It is not a lost cause. You can integrate Crystal Reports into SharePoint and using the drill down functionality in Crystal deliver in-depth information.



My most recent project was to create basically a dashboard to display important metrics for different departments in our company. The dashboard would be accessible to all people in the company (or as security allows) based on SharePoint permissions. The dashboard would be its own site in SharePoint and would also allow the user to drill down on some metrics.



So to start I created a SharePoint site and stripped out the Quick Launch and Top navigation as these were waisting valuable space.



Another of the requirements for this project was to match the functionality of an existing .Net windows app dashboard but to run it in SharePoint so that it could be accessed from anywhere. One of the pieces of the dashboard was rotating images that showed off new products, company functions, and other noteworthy items.



I was able to achieve this in SharePoint by using some Javascript and pulling all the photos from a Photo Library in SharePoint and flipping through them with the Javascript.



A second requirement was that the current dashboard refreshed the data every so many seconds to keep it "real-time". This was a little more tricky to achieve in SharePoint but not impossible. I simply used another piece of Javascript - history.go(0); to refresh the page. Ideally I would like to eventually try and integrate AJAX, so that the page does not need to refresh to load the new data.



So now the next thing was to integrate the Crystal Reports viewer to allow the reports to be shown in the web page. I found the CrystalDecisions.web.crystalreportviewer class and was able to integrate that right into SharePoint. You need to copy the aspnet_client folder that resides in teh web root and copy it into all of your SharePoint virtual directories, otherwise you run into broken images in the viewer.



Once I had the control in place I tried a report and was running into a login prompt asking for the username and password for that connection. I tried placing this information in the code and that did not help. So finally after doing some searching online I came across a post where the user had the same issue and he found that it was an issue with his data provider, so I though about it for a minute and realized that the web server did not have the data provider set up. So I set it up and the report worked like a charm.



Another issue I ran into was the number of controls I had on the page. In order to display all of the metrics the number of controls easily went into the hundreds. By default in the web.config SharePoint only allows for 200 controls on a page. I had to modify this to get my page to work. You will know if you hit this number as the error spells out that you are over the controls limit. Raising this limit can have performance issues so don't just change it without testing the performance of the page and the SharePoint installation.

Preview Pane View of a SharePoint List

Sometimes with all of the things SharePoint can do, you tend to look over many interesting items until someone else mentions them. This happened today when I saw a post by the SharePoint Team at Tallan. The post discussed using the Preview Pane view of a list.



This view allows the user to hover over a list item and see all the other values for the list item. This is all OOTB functionality in SharePoint. All you have to do is go to Modify This View and under the style section select Preview Pane.



I can definitely see this being used in our Intranet installation to allow users to easily thumb through many items to see the related information for that list item.

More SharePoint 2010 News

If you haven't found them already, Microsoft has some sneak peek videos for SharePoint 2010. There is some pretty exciting stuff coming down the pipeline, including better integration with Visual Studio, the Developer Dashboard, and LINQ for SharePoint.

One caveat that you will want to be aware of: SharePoint 2010 is only supported in 64 bit environments, so you may need to upgrade your environment before making the switch.