Display data from SQL Database on Sharepoint - sharepoint-online

I´m trying to figure out how to get some rather simple data (only one table) from an MSSQL Server and display it on a Sharepoint Online (ideally I would also like to have some control over how the data is displayed). But frankly I feel a bit overwhelmed with the information I´ve found on msdn and various forums and I don´t know which route to take.
First of there is the "External Content Type" but the examples seem to be only for Sharepoint 2010?
Then there is web parts but there seem to be differen types: Visual, ASP.Net, client-side etc.? I´ve already fiddled around with the client-side web part, got the tutorial working with Yeoman Sharepoint generator and the 365 Dev programm, but I´m unsure if I´m on the right track or if I´ll find out later that the client-side web part can not do what I need.
Any advice would be much appreciated!

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Using SSRS instead of Crystal reports to generate admin forms

I'm looking into upgrading a .net 2.0 app. The app is used by the public authorities of a certain city to keep track of expenses and generate reports and forms.
The reports and forms were generated in VS2005 using Crystal report. They follow a well defined layout, like official documents usually do.
I am looking at options to upgrade the application and the main problem I have is in determining how to deal with the crystal report files.
I have successfully upgraded to VS2008, but any version after that doesn't have CR anymore, so my company would have to pruchase CR separately and because the client and my company are both tight, I'm looking at alternatives...
The obvious one is using SSRS. I have never touched it before in my life, but after playing around with it for a bit, I get the impression that it is not very well suited to generating forms with lots of non-tabular content and lots of formatting. Or am I wrong?
It seems that every line has to be drawn separately. There is no (that I can see) accurate way of positioning lines for formatting...
But I'm just a beginner, so I might be getting this all wrong?
If that is the case, are there any other alternatives to CR and SSRS?
I was thinking of maybe having a separate MVC web site project in the solution. Have that generate the layout in html and css with data from my entity model, then view the result in a (built-in or not) web browser. Am I overcomplicating on this?
I really need advice from somebody who's done that kind of thing before.
What SSRS is good for:
Talking to SQL Server, much faster than other products as it in many cases retains the database better when in other programs IMHO they repeat query at times.
Designing collapsable grids and chart objects from datasets. You can have 'groups' that can nest aggregates of collapsed values and can be un collapsed or collapsed on demand based on expressions, parameters, or a recusive parent set.
A web service for deployment ease where you can deploy one or many objects. You can also write add ons for this service with C# and the ReportingService.asmx web service.
You can talk to the web service directly in a 'form' object in HTML and manipulate it's output.
You can schedule reports to send out via email and file saves automatically to clients or internal users.
What SSRS IS NOT GOOD FOR:
It is not event driven hardly at all except for parameters. You cannot click on many things and get other parts on the form itself to update. You may do an 'action' that goes to another location, report, or site. But in essence you are calling a seperate object, not the same instance again.
Multiple layers of reporting. Beyond tweaking tool tips you cannot do 'hover over' reporting without hacking SSRS. You can make javascript windows show other reports but it is not baked in to SSRS. So you are either clicking into new reports or tab stops in a report but not getting hover over quick objects beyond text and expressions that are in tool tips.
What do you want before considering what you need to impement?
I want to input and export things while talking to my database - ASP.NET with potentially HTML 5 or MVC4 if you want to be very new. ASP.NET is made for actively talking to a server and taking commands IN as well as OUT.
I want a form to auto update periodically on a page as a landing site and dashboard - AJAX and Javascript on top of HTML, Java or ASP.NET.
I want to create reports that exist on a Server and can be hosted on a wide variety of platforms in .NET via web service calls - SSRS.
SSRS's biggest selling point to me is it's reusability once you dial a report in. They are pretty easy to create, easy to configure, easy to deploy, and if you get a little advanced in calling the webservice you can get SSRS report objects in other technologies if you want.
There is Crystal reports for VS2010 and VS2012. It is just not shipped with them. You can download the installation from here: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7824
I am running through the same decision process at this time. There is a .NET product from a company called "Windward" that will allow you to design your reports in Microsoft Office. If you are in the MS ecosystem already or want your users to design reports instead of always calling on you, this might help.
Their template design tool is called AutoTag and you can deploy these template to their .NET based engine in a few lines of code.
I know the question is regarding SSRS vs. Crystal comparison but thought you should know there are other alternatives and some can make life easier
Ryan

Where to start learning SharePoint 2010?

I recently started at a new job where I'll be working with Sharepoint 2010 to set up (or actually upgrade) an intranet. Unfortunately, I have no experience with SP2010, and the last time I touched SP2007 (or a virtual server for that matter) was four years ago.
I'll be attending a course soon, but until then I have to make myself useful. I've already managed to install a working Sp2010 server and have played around with some web applications and site collections, and trying to find out how Sharepoint Designer works, but I don't really have an idea what I'm doing or what goals I should set for myself to actually learn useful stuff.
I've also watched some tutorials, but most are really problem-specific (problems I don't have yet) or dive into the code (which I won't, probably).
So.. where to start?
There are a lot of great training videos on Channel9.
Sahil Malik's book is organized as what are the basic things all SharePoint 2010 developers need to know. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-SharePoint-2010-Solutions-Professionals/dp/1430228652/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1283973447&sr=8-1
It is a good place to start.
I would suggest video tutorials because:
They are FREE!
They give you more context than just reading what to do.
A quick search will get you specific topics.
Check out Bing videos on SharePoint 2010. There's lots of great content out there to get you going fast.
when i started with SP2010, i began by searching:
New features in Lists and Document
Libraries New search capabilities
DocumentSets (they are very interesting!)
Office Web Apps (Excel and Word web access)
A little bit of FAST Search Engine
Integration with silverlight
Changes in the object model
Workflows
New tools in VS2010
(MSDN, codeplex, codeproject, stackoverflow, and several blogs from Sharepoint MVPs are good places to look for)
I don't know if this would help but that's where I started.. if you need specific help you can find several groups in linkedin.. there are a lots of MVPs helping..
Good luck!
I would recommend you to check out the SharePoint guidance on codeplex. It comes with at sample portal application that is explained and with best practices and guidance for creating a SharePoint site. I am sure that this will provider vital information and knowledge for your project.
Kr., Bernd.
Follow the below link to learn sharepoint. It contains sharepoint tutorial videos and all.
http://www.fastsharepoint.com/
Basically i started my sharepoint learning with the following examples:
Create a feature to change site title
Create a feature to change site theme
Create a feature with feature stapling
Create a feature that activates another feature
Create a site through code
Create a list through code
Populate a list with data through code
Create a lookup column in list through code
These are the basic examples that you can understand what is Sharepoint as a beginner.
Please see the below link for more beginner programs:
http://blog.sharepointhosting.com/Downloads/SharePoint-Tutorials.aspx
Litso install a dev box on you machine and get started.
Try doing some migration from one server to the other.

Getting started with Sharepoint 2007 development

We have an ASP.NET website that we use internally to do some project tracking and various work. We would like to integrate some pieces of it to co-exist with Sharepoint2007 WSS.
Basically what we would really need to do is be able to add items to a list in one of the Sharepoint sites.
I'm not sure where to begin. I've looked online a bit but it seems overly complicated. Is there a quick start guide somewhere that can get me rolling with ease?
The SharePoint Web Services would be a logical place to start. In my opinion this would be the easiest way to build interaction between ASP.NET and SharePoint.
A list of available web services can be found on MSDN.
If adding items to a list is the primary goal, then check out the UpdateListItems method of the Lists web service.
With the scope narrowed to Web Services, you can certainly find tutorials/references online. However, this InfoQ post by Trent Swanson is a decent introduction to SP web services. Note that they recommend generating .NET types using XSD files; in practice, for simple projects I have simply parsed the XML myself using LINQ. You can make it as easy or complex as you like, I suppose.

SharePoint -how to show List data on a custom web part/ web user control?

I am trying every option to show List data on a web part and web user control, but I am not finding any code examples on this. What namespace should I import?
I am using WSS 3.0 and I will later upgrade to MOSS 2007. I am aware of the SmartPart project and I can use it in my environment.
Thank you very much for your help.
You should first look at the Data View Web Part (DVWP) to see if that will fit your needs. With some XLST/JavaScript you can get very creative with this.
Data View Web Part Basics
Otherwise you need to understand two things :-
Creating a Basic web part
This is for VS2010/SharePoint 2010 but you will find similar walkthroughs for other versions such as :-
http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/.net/net_asp/webforms/article.php/c12293/
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/kmcgrath/Creating-a-Web-Part-for-SharePoint-by-Using-a-Designer/
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/Generic_Webparts.aspx
Accessing SharePoint List data
Then once you've got your basic web part you need to know how to use the object model to open a list and iterate through the items in a list to display the data in whatever funky way you want.
Accessing list items

What exactly can "Full Control" with SharePoint Designer accomplish?

I've been brought in as an intern to develop a SharePoint site. My team won't authorize the budget for Visual Studio and I don't have physical or remote access to the SharePoint server (running Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 a.k.a. WSS) on the back-end.
So what exactly can I do? I'm familiar with web technologies like PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. However, since the environment is SharePoint, I'm stumped trying to figure out how much control I have with Microsoft's definition of "Full Control".
If I can write some C#, I'm pretty sure that would be sufficient, but as I said no Visual Studio for me.
Any good ideas of features that people will use on a site built with the limited functionality of WSS and SharePoint Designer with "Full Control"? Can I somehow manipulate the default Web Parts into something cool or useful? Are there Ajax tricks I can do to accomplish something on the back-end?
Thanks in advance, I'm new to StackOverflow and eager to get involved here!
You can actually accomplish a LOT in SharePoint outside of a custom .NET solution. Some recommended learnings are:
JavaScript/jQuery - Know how to interface with a WebService using jQuery. SharePoint exposes a number of very useful WebServices in the /_vti_bin directory. Click here for a list: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms479390.aspx. For example, I recently built a scrolling slide-show webpart entirely using jQuery and SharePoint's built-in webservices that pulls from a provided picture library.
DataForm Web Parts. Do some searching around on what these are and how they work in SharePoint. The tl;dr of these is that they're databound webparts that are bound to an SPDataSource and then rendered using XSLT to format the bound data. You can work with these in SharePoint designer, completely through the markup of your aspx page.
Do some searching on "customizing sharepoint list forms." The NewForm, DispForm and EditForm of any list or library can be customized to have behaviour or content added to them.
Those are just off the very top of my head...
EDIT:
I forgot to also mention http://www.muhimbi.com/Products/SharePoint-Infuser-%28Free%29.aspx
I've been meaning to check this out, since the concept is sound. I haven't tried it out myself but it will save you a lot of hassle when it comes to adding custom script that encompasses your entire site.

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