Fetch WorkflowTemplate for different language - sharepoint

I need to fetch the OOB approval workflow from current web to associate it with my custom list
I tried to fetch it through BaseId but then i got to know that BaseId is not the same for different languages.
Is there any other way to fetch the OOB approval workflow's template for sites created on different languages?
I have also tried GetTemplateByName method but its returning null for any language other than English also.
web.WorkflowTemplates.GetTemplateByName("Approval - SharePoint 2010", CultureInfo.CurrentCulture)
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Sanjay

I solved this problem myself.
As i mentioned in my question, the BaseId varies from language to language. After trying out different methods and googling it, i didn't find any solution to the problem, so i started investigating it myself.
During my investigation, I fetched the BaseId for approval workflow for different languages and soon a pattern emerged. It turned out that BaseId (Guid) is almost same for every language except last three digits and those three digits were basically hexadecimal representation of LCID !!
So, this is how template based id can be formed
string baseId = "8ad4d8f0-93a7-4941-9657-cf3706f00" + web.Language.ToString("X");
Guid workflowBaseId = new Guid(baseId);
so, once we have the base id, we can use the same method to retrieve the template:
web.WorkflowTemplates.GetTemplateByBaseID(workflowBaseId);
I also wrote the blog post on this one here, in case you would like to see the entire piece of code for workflow association: http://sanjaybhagia.wordpress.com/2013/10/20/associating-oob-approval-workflow-with-custom-list-for-different-locale-lcids/
Hope it helps.
Regards,
Sanjay

Related

Sharepoint-Designer 2010 "Remember-Mail-Workflow"

I got an pretty simple problem, but cant get over it.
I got a task in my Sharepoint 2010 and you have to confirm a transaction.. thats working alright.
Each task involves 3 people and they are sorted in a list with the headers :
Assigned to
Title
Status
Result
So I had the idea to make a workflow to remind ppl on the task, when the status in NOT "completed".
This also seem to work, but the problem is when I tell him to get the Description of the "Assigned to" part of the List he always takes the first one. So I have no chance to check the other ones in the list.
I would be really happy if you can help me.
SharePoint Designer 2010 has no built-in capability for looping through multiple List Items that meet a criteria. Most people will say you cannot achieve what you want to do with that version of SharePoint.
However, John Hipplito had a great post several years ago that shows how you can emulate it by creating a separate "Loop through Tasks" list, and you can use one workflow to add items to the second list as needed, and put your desired "for each" actions (in your case, your email reminder) in a separate workflow on the second list. The process is much to long and detailed to list here, so I suggest you read his post at https://www.rbaconsulting.com/blog/tutorial-how-to-loop-through-multiple-list-items-without-code-using-a-sharepoint-2010-workflow/.
Since that blog post is already nearly five years old, and you never know when old blogs may be taken down, I will also post a link here to the wayback machine's archive of that blog post: https://web.archive.org/web/20200215193135/https://www.rbaconsulting.com/blog/tutorial-how-to-loop-through-multiple-list-items-without-code-using-a-sharepoint-2010-workflow/

One custom display form for all the lists

Good day to you. I am newbie in SharePoint 2013 so please bear with me. I have created around 15 lists in my website each containing same columns but different data (they differ semantically).
I am aware that we can change the default view, edit and display form for each list by creating new form in SharePoint Designer 2013. This seems like a very bad approach as far as the maintenance is concerned. I know my lists are exactly the same so why do I have to create same 15 display forms for each of the lists?
Is there a way to create one custom Display form (may be in a central location, i don't know i am just thinking :P ) for all the lists? Is there a way to tell a list to use a specific display form? Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks.
If i understand your question correctly, you have 15 lists with same set of columns. You want to change the display/look of the form. All 15 lists should have same look and feel right!! If yes, then why don't you try with some html, javascript solution. Since you are in sharepoint 2013, javascript support for solutions is very good like rest queries. You can use SPServices also.
If you want to to add data to the list whenever you click on the "New Item" link in the list then hijack this link such that it should navigate to your custom form. Pass your list name as query parameter. Whenever user is saving the form, get the list name from the query parameter and save the data to that list.
There could be another ways also to achieve the solution with html and javascript.
Useful links:
Microsoft, Microsoft, SPServices
Sam I think you can create a custom content type and create custom display form for your content type. Enable the content type in each of your lists so automatically this customized form would be available.
The advantage of this approach is that suppose if you need one more list after some time you can just add this content type and your form would be available into the new list as well.
The approach is explained in the link below.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/varun_malhotra/archive/2009/06/06/define-custom-new-edit-display-forms-for-content-types.aspx
Check this one also
https://joshmccarty.com/2011/02/sharepoint-custom-list-with-custom-content-types-and-custom-display-forms/
Just wanted to write the solution which I implemented as it might help others as well. (Thanks Hiren and Mihir for your valuable inputs)
I had 15 lists and I was showing the data to the user using content search web part with custom display template. All of the lists were using the same display template so I made a new page just to show the item details. In the display template I pointed the item URL (i hijacked the list name and the current item id) to my new page and displayed the item. Let me know if anyone is interested in the whole solution or further elaboration is required.

Search a specific search of a journal article based on the user type

I have this requirement:
We have a journalarticle and we wish to have sections which have content for internal and external users for the application.
We are able to hide the content from rendering by implementing custom template on web content display and using a simple custom-field for a user which helps us to classify it.
Having said that when we search something as an external user, the search portlet is able to fetch an article where the search text is a part of internal user content, and due to the above mentioned template the content is not visible.
In short, from the user's perspective the resultant article does not match the searched term.
I wish to seek some pointer to check whether there is a mechanism to ensure that when an external user searches something then we only search the dynamic-element of the doc which matches the user type?
We have thousands of such articles and create multiple copy of the same article does not seems viable solution.. so any pointers would be a great help.
Liferay version : 6.2 GA4 CE
Thanks!
AJ
First of all: Not finding a search term in a document can be a sign of good working synonym resolution in the search engine. It's questionable if this behaviour is always wrong or only in this particular case. Remember google bombs?
That being said, I believe that this architecture of half-visible documents is flawed from the beginning. Ideally I'd suggest to change it, for example by splitting the information to two articles, so that you can use the standard permissions to resolve. If you link both, you can determine how/which article or template to use. It's not an ideal solution, but might be a workaround.
Another workaround might be to change Liferay's indexer component and index two different versions of the article, with two different permissions. Of course, you'll have to change the search side as well, so that you'll find each article at most once, even if it's now twice in the search engine.
Again - not ideal, but might be the quickest fix that you can get right now without changing the underlying architecture. However, to change the underlying architecture is my actual recommendation.

Can I associate custom metadata with an ALAsset?

I'm building an iPhone app that, among other things, allows the user to take and store photographs associated with locations. I am currently using the ALAssetLibrary to allow the photographs to be stored in Photos and be accessible outside the app (on a computer for instance via the built-in mechanisms). There is not a lot of technical content out there for working with the ALAssetLibrary but from what there is I have managed to cobble together a working version of this. I have had to resort to storing a dictionary of photo URLS in my app and manually detecting if the photo still exists when displaying lists of them because there does not seem to be a way to add custom metadata to an ALAsset.
What I would really like to do is add two custom metadata fields to each asset to provide it with a title and a custom id value that I can use to filter on when enumerating the asset library.
As a secondary task, I'd like the user to be able to update the title metadata.
Can it be done? At this point, I really don't think it can because the API really doesn't seem to provide the necessary methods to get/set custom metadata. I'm hoping against all odds that there is some other aspect to the AssetLibrary framework that I have not yet discovered.
At a minimum, if someone can authoritatively say "NO" then at least others might find this breadcrumb on their own trail of hope and change tack more quickly!
And, having 0 reputation I can't tag it with AssetLibrary :( wow, this day is just going downhill. FML
I've been looking over the documentation and I dont think it is possible to tack on additional fields to the ALAsset object, well you can create your own object or extend theirs but that wont help you when your pulling back assets because you'll need to init yours and populate it then.
Look I know this falls short of a really good answer but I had to try.
The ALAsset class documentation describes a property - customMetadata. This is documented to be an NSDictionary of whatever custom tags you want. Currently, however, it is not implemented in the class (I've raised a bug on Apple's developer site to bring the issue up).

How to get a description of a URL

I have a list of URLs and am trying to collect their "descriptions." By description I mean what comes up, for example, if you Googled the link. For example, http://stackoverflow.com">Google: http://stackoverflow.com shows the description as
A language-independent collaboratively
edited question and answer site for
programmers. Questions and answers
displayed by user votes and tags.
This the data I'm trying to accumulate for the URLs I have.
I tried parsing the URL's meta-descriptions, however most of them are lacking a meta-description (yet Google and other search engines manage to get a description somehow).
Any ideas? Should I just "google" each link and scrape the data? I have a feeling Google wouldn't like this...
Thanks guys.
Different search engines have different algorithms to get the description out of the page if/when they are lacking the description meta tag. Some ignore the tag even it it's there.
If you want the description Google has, the most accurate way to get it would be to scrape it. Otherwise, you could write your own or look around on the web for code that does it.
These are called snippets.
Google use proprietary (and possibly patented) methods to garner this information, so there is no simple answer.
As you suggest, they will use meta-description information if it is there. (How to set the meta-information to help Google.)
They will also honour requests from the page authors to NOT include snippets. (How to prevent Google from displaying snippets) You should probably respect this too (as well as robots.txt, of course.)
You may have some luck with existing auto-summary packages, such as OTS.
You may want to check AboutUs.org (i.e. http://www.aboutus.org/StackOverflow.com).
But, there's little chance that the site will have an aboutus page and not have a meta description.
Some info that might explain how google does this:
Webmasters/Site owners Help
Adding a URL to google
I am not familiar with Google APIs, but perhaps there is an official way to get such information.
Interesting. some sources are better than others.
For "audiotuts.com" google has a worse description than AboutUs.com.
Google
Nov 18th in General by Joel Falconer ·
1. Recently, an AUDIOTUTS reader asked me about creative process. While this
is a topic that can’t be made into a
...
AboutUs.com:
AUDIOTUTS is a blog/tutorial site for
musicians, producers and audio
junkies! It is the sister site of the
popular PSDTUTS, VECTORTUTS and
NETTUTS.
I hate problems like these... they should be trivial but they aren't!
If you can assume English content, you can first look for Meta Description, and if that doesn't work, you can look for the first two or three sentence-like word sequences.
A product I worked on looked for the first P or DIV that contained more than one sequence of > n "words" delimited by periods. It would use the two or three sentence-like sequences, up to x total words, as a summary paragraph. It wasn't 100% accurate, but good enough for the average case. The number of words was adjusted a few times to eliminate things like navigation elements.

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