Limitation of SharePoint Designer(SPD) Workflow

SharePoint Designer is good tool to start initial or basic level workflow, I am not expert and good person to point out any limitation into any software, but as per me below are some of the limitation which I felt for SharePoint Designer Workflow, I’ll also write you more description about some of the limitation in coming posts …

1. We don’t have facility to send BCC email to any person from “Send an Email” actions.


2. We can’t bind and attach more then one list into designer workflow, though there are some manual steps from where we can fulfill our requirements, but there won’t be any easy steps from interface or GUI


3. We can’t deploy/copy our designer workflow from one server to another server like there won’t be any easy way to deploy SPD workflow from development machine to TEST and Production Server; I’ll write how to do manual steps to achieve this functionality. here is my post regarding how to deploy designer workflow ...


4. Designer Workflow don’t give us full customized editor from where we can customized our email body text, to do this, we need to write static HTML tags into email body part.


5. We don’t write any calculation fields or formulas into Designer Workflow actions items, like I can’t extract only date from date-time column into designer workflow interface, for this I need to take one extra column into my SharePoint list and need to manipulate into designer workflow.


6. While working in “Send an Email” action, if we add any list column from adding “Add Lookup to Body” button and if that column don’t have any values into SharePoint list, then it’s shows as ?????? instead of blank values into email body while sending emails …

I’ll update above lists as per my experience with designer workflow.

How to find GUID of SharePoint list

Till now I came across many articles related to finding GUID of SharePoint list from SharePoint interface/GUI, but I think, below is easiest way to find GUID of list.

Go to respective List – >Click on Settings Menu – > Click on List Settings Link- > here in this list settings page, we can find many links, we need to click on “Audience targeting settings” link.

Now, currently we are in Audience targeting page, look up at the URL of current audience target page, that the current address have GUID of list, at the end of URL we can find GUID, like ?List={552bef05-b62c-4c76-a217-35e85a1507f1}

Challenges and limitation while saving list as template from SharePoint GUI

I have found some limitation when I was tried to create new list from existing list template from SharePoint GUI, suppose we have 2 list and one list has lookup column associated with second list column, now we are saving or exporting both list as template and including content to migrate both list from one server to another server, when we are creating new list from saved template, at that time, we are not able to see lookup column values into first list and we are getting error “One or more field types are not installed properly. Go to the list settings page to delete these fields”

 

Resolution:

I need to go into first list and again map lookup column from second list column, because while migrating list from SharePoint GUI, it didn’t keep column relationship mapping. By using 3^rd party tool like AvePoint for list migration, we won’t face such type of error. We can also write custom code to migrate list from one server to another server.

Data view web part – rich HTML text problems/output caching

While working in Data View web part, I have placed user name column into my data view web part, but by default, it displayed some rich text HTML into page, in this case, we need to disable output caching for web part, so for this, we need to put disable-output-escaping="yes" tag into XSL.

 

e.g. <xsl:value-of select="@fieldname" “disable-output-escaping="yes">

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2008/09/20/using-disable-output-escaping-in-data-view.aspx how to disable output caching in data view web part.

Problem with "doctype" column name into SharePoint List

I was faced problem with column name “doctype”, I was not able to create “doctype” column with any of the data type into SharePoint List, and I was getting “Unknown error” into my page when I tried to create column. I tried to find the solution on the internet for some time, but I didn’t get good information, I believe that “doctype” column name is reserved for internal purpose, so we can’t use same name like ID, title column name.

 

Luckily I was able to create “doctype” as single line of text data type, now the actual problem started, I was not able to delete “doctype” column from SharePoint list, definitely we can write custom code and delete same column from code. But I have found easy way to delete “doctype” column from going to tool called “SharePoint Manager 2007” and I have selected my site-> list -> “doctype” column and delete from that tool. You can find more information regarding SharePoint manager 2007 from my blog, here is link http://sanketinfo.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/sharepoint-manager-2007-%e2%80%93-administration-tool/

 

Now if we have requirements to create “doctype” into list, then we can create same column name by changing character case. “doctype” column name is case-sensitive, like we can create column with named “DocType”

Locking down SharePoint Designer (SPD)

One day, I was getting “This web site has been configured to disallow editing with SharePoint Designer. Contact your web site administrator for more information” error while opening my SharePoint site from SharePoint Designer (SPD), after that I have found that one of my admin people change into site definition file onet.xml to restrict us from opening SharePoint designer.

 

Actually we have faced lots of problem while considering SharePoint site access, because when we were giving designer or full control rights to any users for SharePoint site, they can do customization from SharePoint Designer (SPD) tool also, but as per our requirements, only admin people can do customization from SPD, user who has designer or full control rights into SharePoint site, we would like to control them from using SPD tool.

 

I spend good amount of time for finding out the solution, but till now I didn’t find any exact and perfect solution which will best suites and fits for my requirements, because in SharePoint site, all permission are dependent on each other, so if I remove access for ‘Add and Customize Pages permission” level then “Manage Web Site” permission will be also remove from Site Permission section.

  

We can control and lock down SPD In below level.

 

1. Site level, it’s prevent user from opening all site created from specific site definition


2. Web Application level for all users


3. Web Application level per users or groups


4. Site collection level


5. Site collection level from SPD(Contributor settings)

 

We can find many good information regarding how to lock down SPD, but guys believe me that below link giving me very good useful information and main thing, it combine and describes all possible way into one article only.

 

I’ll update my post; if I find any proper solution to locking down SPD for particular set of users with full permission access into SharePoint site from GUI.

 

Reference Link:

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2008/11/25/locking-down-sharepoint-designer.aspx Link contains very useful information describing user security for locking down SharePoint Designer.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940958/en-us : how to change onet.xml file for disallowing users from opening SharePoint Designer

Custom Themes in MOSS 2007

Steps to creating custom themes in MOSS 2007

1. Explore to the Themes folder e.g. LocalDrive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\Themes

2. Make a copy of one of the existing theme folders and rename it e.g. MyCustomTheme.

3. Rename the .INF file which is in the MyCustomTheme folder to MyCustomTheme.INF

4. Edit MyCustomTheme.INF.

1. At the info section, Change the title, to “Custom Site Theme”.
2. In the titles section, rename the names to your new name. This section is to present the name in the different language.

5. Provide an image to give a preview of your theme.
This image should be placed in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES. E.g. MyCustomThemelogo.gif

6. Modify the c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\Layouts\1033\SPTHEMES.xml to include a reference to the new MyCustomTheme theme

<Templates>
<TemplateID>MyCustomTheme</TemplateID>
<DisplayName> MyCustomTheme</DisplayName>

<Description> Apply this Theme for applying MyCustomThemelogo and unique colors and fonts styles.

</Description>
<Thumbnail>images/MyCustomTheme.gif</Thumbnail>
<Preview>images/ MyCustomTheme.gif</Preview>
</Templates>

7. Modify the CSS within MyCustomTheme folder to personalize your theme.

8. Run iisreset from the command prompt

Apply the new theme "MyCustomTheme" to a site by click on SiteActions -> SiteSettings -> sitetheme.

Now Select the newly created theme and click on apply and you can see new look of your site according to you theme.

Google Maps and MOSS

One of my friend has requirements to show Google maps into contact list for SharePoint site, so below are some of the links which will show how to integrate Google maps into SharePoint site.

Two things have to be considered.

1. We can use content editor web part and add JavaScript provided from Google

2. Has to generate or enter key from Google.

Reference links:

http://www.codeplex.com/SPGoogleMap

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/bobbyhabib/archive/2007/12/05/create-a-google-map-web-part-for-free.aspx

http://svengillis.blogspot.com/2007/12/google-maps-and-moss-integration.html

Hiding/Deleting Current Navigation(Left Navigation) from Document library

Below are some of the ways to hide/delete left side navigation from SharePoint Page.

1. Left side navigation bar has predefined placeholder into main master file, so if we open our master page into SharePoint designer and try to find navigation placeholder tag and removed that tag then left side navigation bar will not be displayed into any of site.

So removing place holder from master page will completely remove it for all child pages.

2. If we want to hide in some of the pages then we can override style and achieve result.

I. we have to Edit page in designer and unlock region and remove left navigation frame OR
II. We can put left navigation bar in child page and put nothing inside that tag OR
II. We can put
<style>
.ms-navframe{ display:none; }
</style> on page.

With any of the above steps, left side navigation bar will be removed/hide from pages or document library.