Professional sharepoint® 2010 field guide ppt

.xxi ⊲ Part i using sharePoint technologies and exPloiting functionality chaPter 1 Leveraging the SharePoint Object Model.. ConTenTs Creating Page Layouts Using SharePoint Designer 201

Professional

sharePoint® 2010 field guide

introduction .xxi

⊲ Part i using sharePoint technologies and exPloiting functionality chaPter 1 Leveraging the SharePoint Object Model 3

chaPter 2 Creating Visual Web Parts 35

chaPter 3 Customizing Search 55

chaPter 4 Leveraging the SharePoint Lists Web Service 73

chaPter 5 Custom Field Types, Content Types, and List Definitions 93

chaPter 6 Workflow 131

chaPter 7 Administrating SharePoint 2010 with PowerShell 175

⊲ Part ii sharePoint solutions chaPter 8 UI Design and Branding 211

chaPter 9 Building a Site Provisioning System 233

chaPter 10 Building Scalable Applications in SharePoint 297

chaPter 11 Building a Custom Global Navigation Solution 343

aPPendix a URL Shortcuts 399

aPPendix B CSS Quick Reference 401

aPPendix c Hiding and Customizing Page Breadcrumbs 405

aPPendix d PowerShell Quick Reference 407

glossary 409

index 411

Professional

Professional

Steve Mann Colin Murphy Pablo Gazmuri Chris Caravajal Christina Wheeler

Indianapolis, IN 46256

www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

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to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without tion warranties of fitness for a particular purpose No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional materials The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every situation This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom The fact that an organization or Web site is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a poten- tial source of further information does not mean that the author or the publisher endorses the information the organization or Web site may provide or recommendations it may make Further, readers should be aware that Internet Web sites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read.

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Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.

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trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc and/or its affiliates, in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission SharePoint is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners John Wiley & Sons, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

aBout the authors

steve Mann was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he still resides today He is

an Enterprise Applications Engineer for Morgan Lewis and has more than 17 years of professional experience Steve was previously a Principal Architect for RDA Corporation, where he worked for over thirteen years Steve graduated from Drexel University in 1993 For the past eight years, he has focused primarily on collaboration and business intelligence solutions using Microsoft technologies Steve managed the internal BI Practice Group at RDA for several years He was also heavily involved within RDA’s Collaboration/Search Practice Group Steve has authored and coauthored several books related to the subject of SharePoint Server 2010 Steve’s blog can be found at: www.SteveTheManMann com Steve enjoys vacationing with his family along the east coast, including locations such as Orlando, Florida; Williamsburg, Virginia; Ocean City and Sea Isle City, New Jersey; and New York City They usually hits three or four locations each year Follow Steve on Twitter @stevethemanmann!

colin MurPhy lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he works as a Principal Architect for RDA

Corporation, a Microsoft Gold Partner He has spent the last fifteen years developing Web sites and Windows applications using a variety of languages including C++, PowerBuilder, Java, PHP, and Python, but has primarily been a NET/C# developer for the last ten years Colin has been developing enterprise solutions built on SharePoint since SharePoint 2007 was in beta Colin holds a number of technical certifications including Microsoft Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified Application Developer, Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer, and is also a Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist for SharePoint He has been recognized as a K2 Insider and is the coauthor of the book

Professional K2 blackpearl by Wiley

PaBlo gazMuri is a Principal Architect with RDA Corporation, an IT Consulting firm He has led SharePoint efforts for a number of Fortune 500 companies where he conducts planning, mentoring, training, and coding activities With fifteen years of development experience, Pablo is a web, collabo-ration, and search expert who has built numerous corporate intranets, extranets, ecommerce sites, and custom applications over the course of his career Pablo has recently built custom SharePoint applications enabling project management, document generation, SharePoint site provisioning, gover-nance enforcement, and more You can find him on Twitter as @PGazmuri, or contact him through RDA at http://www.rdacorp.com

chris caravajal has been working exclusively with SharePoint technologies since 2007 As a sultant, he works with organizations on planning and architecting SharePoint solutions that vary in both size and complexity Primarily an “out-of-the-box” specialist, Chris’s main focus is getting the most out of SharePoint with the native features and tools He also has experience building InfoPath forms and SharePoint Designer workflow solutions Chris is a MCTS and is a contributing author to the top-selling SharePoint technical publication, “Professional SharePoint 2010 Administration.”

con-educational institutions, financial institutions, and telecommunications As a trainer, Christina brings her real-world experience to the classroom She enjoys contributing articles to technical Web sites and often speaks at SharePoint community events and conferences You can follow her on Twitter

as @cwheeler76

aBout the technical editor

reza alirezaei MVP, MCP, MCPD, MCITP & MCTS for SharePoint 2010, is a SharePoint tion architect focused on designing custom applications with SharePoint, Office, and Microsoft Business Intelligence technologies Reza is the founder and president of Development Horizon, where

solu-he has solu-helped many clients architect and build large-scale, mission-critical SharePoint applications

He also speaks in many local and international conferences Reza achieved the status of Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for SharePoint in 2006, which he still is today He has also co-authored several books, papers, and articles Reza can be reached at reza@devhorizon.com

Mary Beth Wakefield

freelancer editorial Manager

thanks to christina Wheeler for taking over one of the chapters in this book I am so glad she joined the group of authors Also, thanks to Chris Caravajal from SharePoint 911 for stepping in and taking a chapter as well Thanks to all my SharePoint expert friends and Twitter followers You inspire

me to keep going and doing more with technology Special thanks to Paul Reese, our acquisitions editor, and the entire Wrox project team for helping us create an excellent SharePoint 2010 resource

summary 54

contents

Conventions xxii

errata xxiii

p2p.wrox.com xxiii

Part i: using sharePoint technologies and exPloiting f

summary 33

summary 54

summary 71

Defining Site Collection Search Scopes and Scope Display Groups 60

summary 71

summary 92

Building a Restricted Social Security Number Field Type 99

summary 129

Part ii: sharePoint solutions

Themes 211

ConTenTs

Creating Page Layouts Using SharePoint Designer 2010 226

Deploy Custom Page Layouts Through Visual Studio 2010 227

Registering Custom Application Pages from Receivers 231

Registering Custom Application Pages from Windows PowerShell 232

summary 232

Buildout 243

summary 295

chaPter 10: Building scalaBle aPPlications in sharePoint 297

ConTenTs

this Book Was Written to Provide a wide coverage of complex solutions to common needs and desires from SharePoint 2010 implementations along with great reference material for digging in and learning the new platform; an excellent guide and handbook for people in the field There are plenty of books to ramp up and learn how to do things with SharePoint; however, this book focuses

on the main areas of customization and provides more intricate details as well as specific full-scale solutions that people need to implement It is not a beginner how-to but a second or third book to further deepen one’s understanding and knowledge in SharePoint 2010 It is meant to be a guide for those in the field that suddenly find themselves needing to create custom SharePoint solutions

Who this Book is for

This book is for SharePoint or NET Developers who now need to implement solutions in SharePoint

2010 These are developers that may have been exposed to some SharePoint development but haven’t spent extensive time customizing solutions Those that consider themselves more than beginner but not quite intermediate or advanced can benefit greatly from this book If you need to become an expert in SharePoint 2010 solutions, this book takes you down that road

What this Book covers

This book covers the main aspects of customizing SharePoint from branding and creating web parts,

to exploiting the SharePoint API and building workflows PowerShell administration is discussed and explained The Search features of SharePoint are demonstrated and customized Full-scale solutions are dissected to present best practices and understanding of SharePoint development way beyond out-of-the-box

hoW this Book is structured

There are two parts to this book The first part starts out with the building blocks of SharePoint knowledge and customization The second part gets deeper and more complex while building out applications and custom solutions

What you need to use this Book

In order to benefit the most from this book, readers need to have a SharePoint 2010 development ronment along with Visual Studio 2010 Professional Edition (or higher) Usually a virtual-machine-based environment is more available than physical servers SharePoint 2010 requires 64-bit hardware with at least 8GB of memory and the Windows 2008 R2 operating system

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introduction

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Part I

using sharePoint technologies and exploiting functionality

⊲ chaPter 1: Leveraging the SharePoint Object Model

⊲ chaPter 2: Creating Visual Web Parts

⊲ chaPter 3: Customizing Search

⊲ chaPter 4: Leveraging the SharePoint Lists Web Service

⊲ chaPter 5: Custom Field Types, Content Types, and List Definitions

⊲ chaPter 6: Workflow

⊲ chaPter 7: Administrating SharePoint 2010 with PowerShell

leveraging the sharePoint

object Model

SharePoint provides a rich and complex object model for working with SharePoint data Although it is challenging to master the details of the SharePoint object model, an even greater challenge that many developers face is taking their knowledge of the object model and using it

to craft a solution that delivers on a set of requirements By its nature, SharePoint solutions are often made up of loosely coupled components that combine to deliver a full set of functional-ity, and it is sometime difficult to figure out how to translate knowledge of the object model into the set of loosely coupled components in SharePoint Ask three SharePoint developers how

to solve a particular, nontrivial problem, and you will likely receive three unique solutions that might all be equally valid

This chapter attempts to first cover, in broad strokes, the various customization mechanisms that SharePoint exposes to developers and then provides a number of sample problems and describes how they can be solved the “SharePoint Way.” The chapter provides some basic code snippets illustrating how you can implement various features, but because this chapter is more about how components can be plugged together and combined into solutions, the coverage is not exhaustive

custoMizing sharePoint

SharePoint is a powerful platform that offers many points of extension and customization You can’t cover everything that SharePoint encompasses within a single chapter, but this chapter high-lights some of the most common bits of functionality that you are likely to need to implement in your role as a SharePoint developer

1

ui components

Master Pages and Themes

Master Pages and Themes are the primary mechanism in SharePoint to modify the look and feel of SharePoint Master Pages can best be thought of as controlling the “edges” of a SharePoint page Everything from the breadcrumb and up and from the quick launch and left is determined by the Out of the Box (OOTB), v4.master Master Page This could be extended to control items to the right and below the primary content area of SharePoint pages as well One common change typically implemented by deploying a custom Master Page is the addition of a standard footer to the bottom

of pages in SharePoint

Themes determine the color palette utilized by SharePoint You can build themes using the Theme Designer available from Site Settings or also by using PowerPoint 2010 themes In addition to devel-oping a custom theme, you likely also need a custom CSS file to provide the granular control most branding efforts require

Chapter 8, “UI Design and Branding,” provides a good overview of Master Pages,

themes, and what goes into branding a solution.

Custom Web Parts

Web parts are the primary UI building block within SharePoint They are modular elements that you can place on almost any page within SharePoint SharePoint ships with a large number of web parts, but it will often be necessary to write your own

Within SharePoint 2010, there are two types of web parts: visual web parts and traditional web parts Back in the days of SharePoint 2007, there was only a single type of web part, the traditional web part Unlike most other visual controls within Visual Studio, web parts did not have any sort of WYSIWYG designer, and developers had to build the UI via code SharePoint 2010 introduces the ability to build visual web parts that enable the developer to use a WYSIWYG designer to build the UI

Following is code for a traditional, “Hello World!” web part:

Customizing sharePoint ❘ 5

{

protected override void CreateChildControls()

{

Label label = new Label();

label.Text = “Hello World!”;

figure 1-1: A Visual Web Part design canvas

When placed on a SharePoint page, the two web parts appear to be nearly identical, as shown in Figure 1-2

figure 1-2: Web parts

You probably wonder why traditional web parts continue to exist within SharePoint 2010 because Visual Web Parts provide a better design experience The answer is twofold The first is to maintain backward compatibility and to allow solutions that can be deployed to both 2007 and 2010 envi-ronments The second is that because of the way Visual Web Parts deploy, they are not supported within Sandboxed Solutions There are some alternative implementations of Visual Web Parts, such

as those found within Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools, which do work for sandboxed solutions

Web parts are primarily applicable when you need to implement functionality that requires a UI, is meant to be end-user configurable, and is meant for the site owners or designers to place on pages of their choosing This may not always be the case however

Chapter 2, “Creating Visual Web Parts,” delves into Visual Web Parts in much

greater depth.

Custom application Pages

The other primary UI building block within SharePoint is the custom application page These are standard ASPX pages that are deployed beneath the _layouts directory within your SharePoint environment

Customizing sharePoint ❘ 7

Unlike web parts, custom application pages are standalone pages of self-contained functionality Users cannot edit the contents of the page or add custom web parts If you don’t want the user to determine the placement of the control, or you need to link to the page from another solution ele-ment (for example, a custom action, web part, and so on), application pages are generally the right solution to the problem

A common use for custom application pages is for settings pages, which is probably the scenario in which you see them most used within the OOTB SharePoint screens For example, go to the site settings section of any site in SharePoint, and every one of the settings links take you to an application page.Creating a custom application page is as simple as selecting Add➤➪➤New Item within your project, and selecting the Application Page type This creates an ASPX page beneath the Layouts directory

of your project, as shown in Figure 1-3

figure 1-3: Application page in Visual Studio

As you can see in the screenshot, application pages are just like any traditional ASPX page ten in NET with a few references added to SharePoint assemblies Just like the other pages within SharePoint, application pages make use of a Master Page, and content placeholder regions are

writ-exposed for you to add content to Figure 1-4 shows a sample application page

Application pages are deployed to the Layouts directory and, as such, are not deployed as part of a feature This means that application pages are accessible from within any site within your farm just

by appending \_layouts\<path to page> and SharePoint does not secure them assuming the user has access to the site, so you need to check user access within your own code

figure 1-4: Application page in SharePoint

Custom lists

SharePoint Lists provide a flexible and extensible way for users to store data within SharePoint and

is frequently be used by developers as a location to store information as well In many instances, these types of “configuration” lists are hidden from the user, and all interactions with the list data occurs through UI elements such as web parts and application pages, but there are cases, particu-larly when the user must maintain lists of data that you want to expose the list directly to the user

In those cases, it may be sufficient to simply link them directly to the list and use the default list UI

to allow the users to manage the list items In more complicated scenarios (consider an example in which you have complex multicolumn validation requirements or in which you have multilevel drop-downs) the OOTB UI provided by lists is insufficient

Custom List Forms

List forms refer to the add, edit, and display forms accessible from SharePoint when a user adds a new list item or clicks on an existing list item and chooses to view or edit it Typical scenarios in which you might need to customize these would be if you need to add complex validation logic that spans across multiple columns in the list or in which selections made to one column affect those available

in another However, list forms are only one way in which you can enter list data within a list Users interacting with a list through the datasheet view, through the office information panel, or through Access cannot enjoy the same experience, so you need to account for these usage scenarios

Customizing sharePoint ❘ 9

Chapter 5, “Custom Field Types, Content Types and List Definitions,” covers lists and list forms in great detail and illustrates how to create custom list forms, so they will not be covered further here, but 2010 provides a number of mechanisms for customizing these forms: You can use SharePoint Designer, InfoPath, and Visual Studio to create more robust list forms

Custom Field Types

Field types are the basic building blocks of lists and content types Whenever you add a new column

to a SharePoint list, you select from a variety of predefined column types such as Currency, Number, and Choice By selecting these types, you can decide what types of data can be entered and how that data displays and can be manipulated Figure 1-5 shows a standard column creation dialog

figure 1-5: Creating a column in SharePoint

Creating custom field types adds to the list of standard types of new columns and enables you to dictate how information displays and interacts within the standard SharePoint list UI They are most appropriate when you need to implement rules about the types of data fields can contain or the formatting of the display of your data (masking a Social Security number, for example)

Chapter 5 discusses creating custom field types in greater detail.

Delegate Controls

SharePoint supports delegate controls, which might best be described as functionality ers Developers can register their own implementation of the functionality that overrides the OOTB implementation You can embed many delegate controls within the default Master Page and include things such as the search box

placehold-As example of how to embed a delegate control in a Master Page is shown in the following code snippet:

<SharePoint:DelegateControl ControlId=”SmallSearchInputBox”

AllowMultipleControls=”false”/>

This snippet basically tells SharePoint that the developer wants to embed a control called

SmallSearchInputBox into this location, but the developer requires no knowledge of the mentation of the control

imple-Delegate controls can also have a default implementation specified directly within the body as well Following is an example in the TopNavigationDataSource delegate control from the v4.master:

Delegate controls are most useful when you need to replace a bit of OOTB functionality that exists within multiple locations in SharePoint such as the search box, navigation providers, and so on Unfortunately, not every control in the OOTB Master Pages uses delegate controls, so their use is limited to specific controls

nonvisual components

Visual components are only half of the story with most SharePoint customizations Equally necessary

is the ability to implement nonvisual functionality, such as executing code at periodic intervals (a timer job) or executing code after an item is added to a list (event handlers or workflow)

Because there is considerable functionality overlap, determining when to write a list workflow sus writing an event handler is confusing Workflows provide some advantages during the creation process because codeless workflows can be authored via SharePoint Designer, and workflow actions exist so that developers don’t need to write custom code But assuming you need to write code with either implementation, event handlers are best used for short-running, atomic processes that do not require user involvement and are tied to the specific list in question Event handlers are also the only option if you want to intercept an action before it happens If the requirement being met involves long-running processes that involve waiting for multiple inputs from users or which are triggered from multiple locations, a workflow is more likely to be the correct solution.

ver-SharePoint 2010 also introduces a new type of workflow called a site workflow Site workflows are tied to sites rather than individual lists and can be only manually triggered (or via code) Site work-flows are primarily useful when the workflow in question is not tied to actions around a particular item in a list Imagine a scenario in which you need to find a single item in a list based on some characteristic and then email the creator of that item In that case, because you want the workflow

to find the item, a site workflow is appropriate If instead you want to email the creator of an item every time it updates, a list workflow is appropriate

Chapter 6 covers workflow in greater detail.

Chapter 11 contains an example of a timer job used to process links contained within a list to retrieve access information to secure the items

feature receivers

Feature receivers are just an alternative form of an event receiver tied to SharePoint Features rather than SharePoint Lists Feature receivers enable the developer to run arbitrary code whenever a fea-ture is installed or removed from a farm/web application/site collection/web, whenever a feature is activated or deactivated, or when a feature is upgraded

One common use for feature receivers is to register timer jobs deployed by a feature Following is an example of what code to add for a timer job whenever the feature activates:

public override void FeatureActivated(

SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

{

SPSite site = (SPSite)properties.Feature.Parent;

CustomTimerJob smbJob = new CustomTimerJob(“My Job Name”, site);

SharePoint provides two mechanisms to support external access The first, which existed in SharePoint

2007 and continues to exist in 2010, are web services The second is Client Object Model, which is new to SharePoint 2010, which you can access from NET, Silverlight, or JavaScript

The main advantage to using the Client Object Model over the web services is that rather than having

to learn a completely new way to access SharePoint content, developers can reuse much of their edge of the server-side object model There definitely are some differences, but in general, the Client Object Model provides a much more familiar framework

knowl-sharePoint Web services

SharePoint provides a rich set of web services (both ASMX and WCF/RESTful) to enable external applications to interact with SharePoint Although not everything is exposed via web services, a great deal of functionality is For those writing code in NET, Silverlight, or Javascript, the Client Object Model introduced in 2010 will likely be the preferred mechanism for interacting with SharePoint, but for developers writing in other languages, web services continue to be the primary mechanism used

to interact with SharePoint

The list of web services SharePoint provides follows:

Client object Model

The Client Object Model is a set of APIs that enable you to design custom applications that access SharePoint content It includes libraries for client applications based on the NET Framework This new API is targeted for building things such as console, Windows Forms, and WPF applications The Client Object Model also includes a library for Silverlight and JavaScript client applications The Silverlight library is composed of a subset of the object model These interfaces include the Managed NET Client Object model, Silverlight Client Object, ECMAScript (JavaScript, Jscript) Client Object Model, and LINQ to SharePoint

The NET Client Object Model for SharePoint 2010 is one of the newest APIs for working with SharePoint content The Client Object Model API enables you to build custom applications in any of