A Rolling Stone Gathers No MOSS

Renaming the Title field in a list or site

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:41:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:21:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:13:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:00:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:29:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:49:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:16:00 +0000

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.

Convert to XSLT Data View

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:07:00 +0000

Sometimes when working with SharePoint list views, you may want to be able to customize the view to include additional information or to have the list items link to a specific URL. This was the case with a recent project of mine. I wanted to be able to direct the user to a page that would log which articles from a list they were viewing. That way we could track which products were receiving more questions and train the sales reps accordingly.

I began by creating some custom views and setting some filter criteria on them. When you do this it creates an ASPX page under the list. You can view these pages using SharePoint Designer. When I viewed the page I could not find a discernible block of code that corresponded to the link that gets created on a list item so that you can view the details for that item.

Then I remembered the Convert to XSLT Data View option. If you right-click on a list view web part and selec this option it will convert the list view code into XSLT. It is much easier to find blocks of code this way. I used this to make the default URL in the list item links point to my page and then redirect the user to the list item.

One thing to be aware of is that if you switch to the XSLT Data View, you will no longer be able to modify the view from the browser. The only option available will be to change the name of the view. You can overcome this by opening the view in SharePoint Designer and right-clicking on the web part again and selecting Revert to SharePoint list view. This will remove any of the customizations that you made, though, but it will allow you to edit the view in the browser again.

Slide.Show and SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:18:00 +0000

I was recently looking for a way to display a slide show of images for a section of our Intranet and came across Slide.Show. It is an open source project that uses Silverlight and allows the end-user to highly customize the presentation (although this is not documented real well yet). You can attach the slide show to an XML file, Flickr, or a custom provider (such as a SharePoint list). The setup is pretty easy. This series of posts by Robert MacLean describes how he attached the Slide.Show to a SharePoint Photo Library.

This makes it even easier for users to add and remove photos from the slide show. They can upload them to the photo library and the slide show will start showing them. This is the ultimate goal that I would like to reach with this so that I don't have to manage the photos for the end users. I simply set up permissions to the photo library and let them manage the photos how they want.

One drawback to the Slide.Show project is it using Silverlight. Although many people installed it to watch the Olympics, there are still good number of people that do not have it installed. For these users, they will see the blue Download Silverlight button and if they are not as tech savy, might not want to download Silverlight if they don't know what it is. Until Microsoft pushes Silverlight out as a required download, this will be an issue.

Using Today field in SharePoint list views

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:52:00 +0000

One of the coolest things about SharePoint lists is that you can filter the items in a list to such values as [Today] and [Me]. There are many posts out there of people trying to display items from this week or this month. You can do this by using the Today field in a calculated column. This blog details how to do that. The issue that you will run into is that the Today value does not update unless you edit the list item.

I worked around this by creating a simple console application that is set up as a scheduled task on the SharePoint server. The application opens up the list and loops through the list items and calls item.Update() on each one. This causes the date modified date to update and it updates the Today reference.

I have successfully used this to maintain current month views on a list. If anyone knows of another way to keep the today value updated without running a separate application, let me know.

SP2 and should you install itt?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:16:00 +0000

I came across the SP2 for MOSS and WSS and was interested in installing it on our corporate Intranet installation of WSS. I upgraded the test environment without any issues (other than an authentication issue, but that is my fault). I was then thinking about installing it on the Internet-facing installation of MOSS.

Good thing I didn't.

I came across a bunch off blog posts over the last few weeks and the Microsoft KB article saying that installing the service pack will reactivate the trial expiration date on MOSS and after 180 days MOSS will not be available to end-users.

I have to step back here for a minute and wonder if anyone in the Office realm of Microsoft tests any of the items they push out as Service Packs? It seems to me that you would test the code that you are going to send out to your clients to install in production environments. I realize this would not pop up until after 180 days passed, but I would hope that some testing goes into these things.

If you want to proceed with installing Service Pack 2 and "beta testing" for Microsoft, you will want to follow the procedure outlined in this KB article to make sure you don't lose functionality after 180 days.

Search Results not Security Trimmed

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:20:00 +0000

Recently, our new corporate Intranet went live and I happened to be performing a search while logged in as a limited user to verify that security-trimming was working. I was surprised to find that this user was getting back results that they did not have access to. I could tell this since there were items in the results that when clicked on took me to the access denied page.

I began looking for some answers but was unable to find anyone else out there that was having the same issue. This led me to believe that it must have been something that I did custom to our site that was causing the issue. I remembered that I was having trouble with the imppersonation piece when I was testing some custom code before and that I had went into the web.config file and set impersonation to false. So I thought it a wise decision to go back in there and set it back to what it normally is (true). I saved the change and ran a search and found that I was only getting back items I was allowed to see. I was relieved that at least SharePoint search was working the way it is suppose to.

Now I just had to figure out what to do in my code so that I could leave impersonation on. Impersonation allows the SharePoint application to impersonate other users and this allows a user to perform a search and SharePoint checks that users permissions to see which files they are allowed to see. It then returns only those items in the search result. By turning impersonation off I was running all of this as the System Account, which had access to all items in the site.

I was finally able to find a way in my code to perform the functions I needed to while allowing impersonation to continue. Let this be a lesson to me: Don't go changing items in web.config without fully understanding the implications.

Portal Site Connection - What is it?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:49:00 +0000

I was poking around in the Site Collection Settings and came across the link to Portal site connection. I always wondered what that did so I clicked on the link and was taken to a page where I could connect to a portal site and enter the Web address and name for the portal site. This didn't really help me figure out what it does if I put a site in there, so I did some searching and cam across Gavin's SharePoint Blog. He has a post that talks about the portal site connection and it made a lot of sense to me.

Basically it adds a link to the top level breadcrumb trail that can point back to a top-level site collection. This might not be handy in most instances of SharePoint development but if you create a new site collection for projects or areas of the company, it makes it nice to be able to have a link back to a 'home' portal.

SP2 for MOSS and WSS 3.0

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Thu, 21 May 2009 11:51:00 +0000

Just as I get all of my servers updated to Service Pack 1, I find that Service Pack 2 has been released. It includes some more performance enhancements and prepares for a better upgrade to SharePoint 2010, which isn't that far off. Below are links to the downloads for both clients and servers:

Office 2007 SP2

Office 2007 Language Pack SP2

WSS 3.0 SP2

Wss 3.0 Language Pack SP2

MOSS 2007 SP2

MOSS 2007 Language Pack SP2 (x86)

MOSS 2007 Language Pack SP2 (x64)

I just ran the updates on one of our test servers and it did not require a reboot, and the installation itself went well. I ran into some trouble with the Web application in that at one point to test something else I had turned off impersonation in the web.config file and I was getting a cannot complete action error on the site.

I poked into the 12 hive log and found an error that said, "Could not initialize the securable object for /default.aspx during an http get. I am thinking this is due to some of the changes for Forms Based Authentication that came in SP2. Once I changed that back to true for the impersonation, everything was back up and running.

The undocumented truth about SharePoint Search

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:18:00 +0000

Now that the new corporate Intranet has gone live, I decided I would test some of the Search functionality to make sure it is working correctly. I did a search on a keyword that I knew should return results from the Intranet and was only getting back results from the file share I had indexed. I logged into the Search Server 2008 administration site and found that my Local Office SharePoint Server sites content source had no items in the successes lately and had an error. So I looked at the crawl log and found the error "Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to the crawl repository...."

I knew that the account I was using could access the content because I logged into the site with that user account and was able to get to all of the pages without any problems. The next spot I looked was the SharePoint logs and I did not find anything out of the ordinary in them so I moved onto the Event logs. In there were some warnings for the Office Server Search that said "The start address <http://intranet/> cannot be crawled. Context: Application 'SharedServices', Catalog 'Portal_Content'

Details: Access is denied. Verify that either....."

This was repeated in the events every time I tried to run a Full Crawl. I knew that many things affect the crawling of a SharePoint site, including Alternate Access Mappings, content account privileges, and content rules or scopes.

I started looking into all of these things and they all looked ok to me and I knew that search was working before on this web app. The only thing I had changed since then was to extend the application to out production domains for internal and external access. I started searching and found that there were just as many answers as there appeared to be questions when it comes to this error. Many of the answers were "Check to make sure that the content crawl account has access to the site."

The answer ended up being a combination of many articles, one of them being this Event ID site. I scrolled down to the area where people added their comments and found one from Ionut Marin that said you should extend the web app with a new site. I then followed the Google Groups link at the bottom of that site and it took me to another person that said I should extend the web app. I ended up following his instructions to the letter.

I went to Central Administration -> Application Management.

Select Create or extend web application and make sure you have the right web application that you want to extend.

Set all of the parameters on the extend web app. page as needed, but you should set the host header to be the name of the server.

From the zone list pick anything other than Default.

When you are done with that, go to Authentication providers and make sure that your newly created web app. is set to use windows integrated authentication.

Then go to Operations -> Alternate Access Mappings for the web application.

Click Edit Public URLs and switch out new URL you just created for whatever is currently in the Default zone. The URL that is in the Default zone can be placed in any other zone.

Wait a few minutes and change your Local Office SharePoint Server sites content source to crawl the new web address. So for my example the server name is web2. I created a new extended web app. with a URL of http://web2:1234/. The port is not really important as you will not access the site at all using this URL. I then set the start address in the content source to be http://web2:1234/.

I started a full index and noticed that items were showing back up in the index.

Another thing that I noticed after the crawling was working again was that I was getting warnings in the crawl log for all ASPX pages that said "Content for this URL is excluded by the server because a no-index attribute." This seems to be a generic error for a number of things that could go wrong and did not point to my issue specifically. So I tried clicking on the link that was having the issue and got back a more meaningful error that said "Code blocks are not allowed in this file."

I understood this because it was indexing the new web app. and I had added a Page Parser Path to the web.config for my other web apps in order to run some custom code. After I placed the Page Parser Path in the new web apps web.config file I could hit the page through the new URL and I ran another Full crawl of the site. This time the number of items in the index increased and the warnings decreased dramatically. I looked into the crawl log and there were no more warnings about the ASPX pages.

Although this resolution worked for me, it may not be the same for you. As I said, Search seems to have many issues or areas of configuration that could cause errors or prevent content from being indexed.

SEO Optimization for SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:17:00 +0000

I have been keeping an eye on SharePoint blogs and the Microsoft SharePoint site for a while now and I happened across an article about SEO Optimization for Web Content Management Sites. This article outlines some best practices for optimizing an Internet-facing SharePoint site for search engines.

For a while I have been trying to figure out a way to handle URL chopping in our SharePoint site. This article provides a solution that works well and also takes care of the 302 temporary redirects that SharePoint uses and turns them into 301 permanent redirects.

I used the example in the article and also merged it with an example I found at Waldek Mastykarz's blog to handle both the case of SharePoint creating the 302 and also handling chopping at the pages document library level, which SharePoint does not do by default. The solutions are easy to deploy into the environment, just make sure to place the compiled code in the bin directory for that virtual site and add the additional lines to the web.config file.

Results from the Kalamazoo X Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:52:00 +0000

I have to admit that as one of the planners for the first ever Kalamazoo X Conference, I was concerned about the results and experience we would be providing. Up until the last week or so, we had few registrants and so we decided to change the format from a a multi-track, multi-session format to one track. This was a challenge for the speakers as they had to pare their talks down from an hour to 25 minutes. This did allow all attendees to see all of the sessions instead of choosing between two speakers they wanted to see.

The format also allowed the speakers (almost all who were close friends) to bounce jokes and their talks off one another and earlier sessions transitioned into the later sessions.

I was also impressed with the number of attendees, which was close to 90 or more. We received positive feedback on the format and content of the conference, which tended to be more soft skills that you do not see at most other technology conferences. If you missed out on the experience you can see more feedback and slide decks on the website in the upcoming weeks. Wish you could have been there this year, stay tuned to the Kalamazoo X site for more information on next year's conference.

SharePoint 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:42:00 +0000

News is starting to be released about Office '14' and we are starting to get a little more information about the next version of SharePoint which is now Microsoft SharePoint 2010. Additional information can be found on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog. I am excited to see what is in store for this next version of SharePoint.

Using Google for more than Searching

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:56:00 +0000

Sometimes it is hard to move from set ways. I often find myself using Google to research new things to try in SharePoint or to search for other people that may be having an issue I came across.

Google is valuable for many other things you may want to know. From the main Google search box you can get weather, stock quotes, time, do mathematical calculations, convert units, get dictionary definitions, get movie showtimes, find houses and real estate, flight status for planes, package tracking, patent numbers, and area codes.

To get the weather, type in the search box "weather (city name)".

To get a stock quote type in the ticker symbol.

To get the time in a city, type in "time (city name)".

To do mathematical calculations, type in the calucation.

To convert between units type in something similar to "convert 10 inches to cm".

To get a dictionary definition type in "define (word to define)".

To get movie showtimes type in "movies (ZIP code)".

To get housing and real estate type in "homes (city name)".

To get flight status type in the name of the airline name and the flight number.

To track a package just type in the tracking number.

To find a patent, type in "Patent (patent number)".

To see the geographical location for an area code type in the area code.

Another Google service I have been using lately is the Web History. I turned it on for Google search page only and it helps to be able to go back in time and find the pages I visited based on a certain search. It has definitely reduced the number of bookmarks I have in my browsers.

Usage Analysis Processing

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:38:00 +0000

One of the fairly overlooked items in WSS 3.0 and MOSS is the ability to access reports on site usage and other useful items such as broken links, slow pages, etc. By default this capability is not turned on in WSS or MOSS. If your organization wants to be able to quickly see statistics for SharePoint site usage, then Usage Analysis Processing is a good place to start. Another option available is Google Analytics, which works well also.

To set up UAP, log into the Central Administration page and under Logging and Reporting click on Usage analysis processing. On this page there are two sections, one for logging settings and one for processing settings. Under loggin settings, check the checkbox to enable logging and you can change the location of the log file (which by default is the LOGS folder in the 12 hive.) You can also set the number of log files to create as long as it is between 1 and 30.

Under processing settings, check the checkbox for enable usage analysis processing and then set the time range that you want the server to do processing. This should be a time frame when the server is less busy as the processing will slow down the web server. Click the Ok button and that is all there is to it. You will probably need to wait a day or two before you will start getting usage reports.

To access the reports, you can use SharePoint Designer by opening the site you want the stats for and clicking on Site and then Reports. You can get reports for Files, Problems, Usage, and more.

For more information about UAP and where the files reside check out this article.

Kalamazoo X Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:45:00 +0000

If you are interested in a conference that offers speakers and discussions unlike any other conference around, check out the Kalamazoo X Conference. It features topics including:

Human interaction, including social, personal, and career development.
Interface and graphic design
Development processes and best practices
Requirements analysis, architecture, design, and modeling

The conference is April 25th from 8AM to 6PM in downtown Kalamazoo, MI, at KVCC's Center for New Media. Registration is only $20 for professionals and $10 for students. For more information and to register go to www.kalamazoox.org.

Empty ULS (12 Hive) Logs

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:04:00 +0000

I was looking into turning on the Usage Analysis Processing and poked into the 12 hive LOGS folder as that is where Usage Analysis log files are stored. I noticed that the ULS log files (which are normally huge, since SharePoint logs every thing it does), were all 0kb. I thought I had this problem before but could not find any answers, so I started searching. I finally found a blog that talked about empty MOSS logs and it jogged my memory that one of the things that will fix this is to restart the Timer job service.

So I went into the services and restarted the Windows SharePoint Services Tracing and Windows SharePoint Services Timer services and the minute they were reset, the logs started filling up.

I have not found a reason for them to stop logging yet, but I am still looking.

Postback Events Don't Fire In FireFox

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:54:00 +0000

Today I was looking at our Internet-facing SharePoint site after my roommate told me that the language drop down was not working in Firefox. I thought for sure it must have been something that changed in Firefox since it still worked in IE, Safari, and Chrome. I did some research to see if other people were having any problems with drop down lists or post backs in Firefox and I found many posts about similar problems but none of them matched my case.

Then I found a post where someone was having the same problem and that after hours of them searching for what was wrong, they found that their form tag was outside the body tag. So I poked into SharePoint Designer for my master pages and sure enough my form tag was way up at the top just within the HTML tag and not inside the body tag like it should be.

I have had problems with this before where SPD will move the location of code because it thinks that is where the code should go. This time it nearly caused me to pull out my hair. So if you find that post backs aren't working in Firefox only you may want to check the location of your form tag and make sure that it is inside the body tag.

When IsVisible is not really Visible....

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:35:00 +0000

Today I was faced with an interesting project. I have some external users of the Intranet site I am working on that need to only see one list of items on the Intranet site. What makes this tricky is that I have customized the Quick Launch navigation so that every link (and even the headings) are custom, which means SharePoint will not security trim them.

I began searching for ways to hide items in the Quick Launch when I came across a post by Todd Baginski that talked about programmatically adding and removing items from the Quick Launch menu. I followed down the article and found the SPNavigationNode object and decided to search the MSDN for that class. I found a property called IsVisible that allows you to set whether the Menu Item is visible or not. Great!! I thought. This is exactly what I need to hide these items for this external group of users. I added the lines of code to set the property:

menuItem.IsVisible = False

menuItem.Update()

web.Update()

When changing the properties for items such as Menu Items, List Items, or Lists, you should always call the Update method to update the properties. I called the SPWeb.Update method for good measure to make sure that the menu item was updated.

Ran the page and guess what, the menu item was still there. So I checked further into the Internet and found a some people that agreed that the property does not work. So I submitted a question on the MSDN forums and will see if this is a Microsoft bug and if there is a fix for it.

As for the way I finally decided to hide the menu items is a little bit of a hack. For now I am hiding the entire Quick Launch menu and displaying a custom link that I created just for that group of users. I call this a hack because I had to work around that property bug and because I will need to edit the master page and create a new link from hand any time that group of users needs to see another item in the site.

Using Geq and Leq in your CAML queries

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Markel) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:04:00 +0000

If you have worked with SharePoint for very long, more than likely you have come across CAML and wondered why Microsoft created a new language for querying SharePoint list data. You may also have been stuck in the 'CAML loop' where you build a query and run it to find the error 'One or more field types are not installed properly.' This error usually means that you are not using the proper 'internal name' of the field.

CAML is a fairly powerful querying language and can allow you to build fairly complex queries once you understand the schema.

First things first - CAML is case sensitive and is based on XML so it has opening and closing tags.

A simple CAML query would look like this:

<query><where><eq><fieldref
name='Submitted_x0020_By'><value
type='Text'>Me</value></eq></where></query>

Once you have a simple query figured out you can use ANDs and ORs to connect multiple parts of the query together. You simply wrap two Eq queries inside the <And></And> tags (or the Or tags). You can embed multiple Ands and Ors inside each other to create complex queries.

Another set of nodes that I have recently used were <Leq></Leq> and <Geq></Geq> to get back items greater than or equal to or less than or equal to a selected item such as a date.

You can also add items to a list using the Batch and Method commands.

There is an entire list of CAML elements as well as some samples of what you can do with CAML located on MSDN.